Harnesses

Use harnesses to define the appearance and processing of user forms used in your application to create work items and process assignments.

Choose from more than a dozen standard harness forms for entering, reviewing, updating, and processing work items and assignments. Your application can override the standard rules to extend and tailor them to specific needs.

Before creating or editing harness, section or flow action forms, set the Using skin preference to the skin that application users are expected to use. This provides the closest approximation during development of the run-time look and feel of the form.

You can use harnesses to define composite portals, as well as user forms.

> Controls

On the Design tab, each harness references one or more sections that define the run-time presentation of the work item. You can directly edit these sections in the Harness form, using these controls and layouts. When you save the harness, the updated sections are also saved.

> Applications without user forms

Work object forms defined by harnesses are typical, but not required, elements of an application. Some business process management applications use an external portal or external system and call services to create work items, advance them through a flow, perform flow actions, and so on. The Process API is a collection of standard activities that apply to the Work- base class to support such headless applications.

> Where referenced

Each flow rule that creates a new work item identifies a harness to capture initial information about that work item.

Standard activities that apply to the Work- class look (using rule resolution) for harnesses with specific names, such as New, Perform, and Review. To display a user form defined by a harness, call the standard @baseclass.Show-Harness activity in your activity.

> Action section

Harnesses that allow users to select from multiple flow actions (often called Perform harnesses) contain an action section. See Presenting Flow Actions.

> User interaction with user forms

For basic information about using user forms defined by harnesses from an application user perspective, see Working with user forms.

> Rule forms

Some rule forms are defined through harness and sections. This capability is reserved.

> Access

Use the Application Explorer to access the harnesses that apply to the work types in your application. Use the Records Explorer to list all the harnesses available to you.

> Category

Harnesses are instances of the Rule-HTML-Harness class. They are part of the User Interface category.