Assignment types – Worklist Vs Workbasket in pega

December 10, 2024 Code Vault Curators

In this blog article, we will see more in detail about the most commonly used assignment types in Pega

Update: The concept of Assignment remains the same across different Pega versions. Most of the screenshots in this blog article were reused from Pega 7 version and few were updated. Use this blog article to learn the concepts and you can try the entire tutorial in the latest versions as well.

Generally what do you mean by assignments?

A piece of work allocated to someone.

BPM – Business Process Management. Pega is a BPM tool. Every BPM application involves processing Cases and performing work.

Who will be processing this work?

It can be performed either by someone or it can be automated.

So, If a particular task is to be performed by someone, then we can say he/she is assigned to a task.

Let’s relate this to Pega.

Loan Approval process

Consider bank ABC provides personal loans. ABC Bank uses Pega application for loan processing.

We will use the above picture.

Step 1: Person A fills out the loan request application and applies for the loan.

Step 2: The Bank receives the loan and creates a loan request case. Say Loan – 1. (Case creation can be initiated by many ways like Service Email or any other services)

Step 3: Now the case Loan – 1 is assigned to a workbasket.

What do you mean by workbasket?

– You can consider the workbasket as a parking place for work.

– Cases/work waits here until some people or some automation process handles it.

Step 4: Now bank employees can pull cases from the workbasket and process the case individually.

It means the cases are moved from the workbasket assignment to the worklist assignment.

What do you mean by worklist?

– Worklist means the list of cases/works assigned to individual operators rather than waiting at a parking place.

Step 5: After processing the request, the employee sends the case to the bank manager’s worklist. The bank manager can either approve or reject the case.

The case is resolved.

Now technically, the case lifecycle can be described in 5 steps

Case creation
Assigned to workbasket – waits for bank employee
Assigned to worklist – bank employee picks and processes the request.
Assigned to worklist – bank manager approves/reject the request.
Case resolved.

First, let’s create a new loan request case with simple stages and steps. In the middle explain more aboutthe worklist and workbasket.

My Initial design is to have 4 stages.

In the case creation stage, I am going to collect the information.

Now let’s understand both the worklist and workbasket through the tutorial exercise

What are other prerequisites for the tutorial?

1. Actors / Operators

We will use 2 actors.

BankEmployee1
BankManager

Step 1: Create 2 operator IDs using the above names.

Note: Ideally, both operators can have their own access group with roles. To stay in the context of this tutorial, I provided them with default manager access group

2. Workbasket

Now let’s see how we can create a new workbasket.

Step 1: Records -> Organization -> Workbasket / Work Queue ->right click Create

Update: In the later versions, Pega renamed the rule from Workbasket to Work Queue. Both refer to same concept 😊

You can specify the workbasket name and description

Note: Always provide some meaningful name. My suggestion is to append a queue at the end.

Step 2: Fill out the workbasket form.

General

Type – Standard / Robotic. This was introduced recently supporting robotic automatic. Let’s select standard.

Organization

You have to specify the organizational structure to which this workbasket belongs.

We can use our current org/div/unit name.

Work group – a group of related people working together. Ideally in every application we have different work groups for different people.

For now, use your default organization workgroup. In our application, it is Default@PKS.

Contacts

You can list the operators that are related to this workbasket.

Say for example, a Bank clerk should be notified whenever a new loan request arrives in the workbasket. Then you can include the bank clerk operator ID in the contacts array. It accepts more than one operator.

Then you can use default activities like NotifyAssignees or NotifyAllAssignees to notify the contacts 🙂

For now, we leave it blank

Roles

This will provide the security for the workbasket.

Say for example, you need only Bank employees to pick items from the workbasket and process the loan request, then you can add the Bank employee role in the Roles array.

Then only operators who possess the specified role can pick up the cases from workbasket 🙂

For now, we leave this too blank! Save the Workbasket rule form.

We are done with the prerequisites.

Let’s go ahead and configure a new Loan request case with the right assignments

Step 1: Case Designer – Add a new case type Loan request

Step 2: Add the 4 stages.

Step 3: Start adding steps

Stage 1 – Add a collect information step

Click on Configure View and Input the fields. I am just collecting some basic information.

Stage 2 – we will configure the process manually.

Stage 3 – Use approval/reject shape.

You can specify Route to – specific user and specify the Bankmanager operator ID. You can also assign the case to the workbasket here.

Specific user – Worklist

Work queue – workbasket

Step 4 – Resolve the case.

Stage 2 – Process Creation

Let’s create a new process for stage 2 manually. All you have to create is a new flow rule.

As per our design, In the second stage first we need to route the assignment to workbasket and then it will be routed to the bank employee worklist.

Step 1: Go to stage 2 and use the dropdown icon and select “Add process”.

Type the process name as loan processing and save the rule.

Then click on Open process on the right side to open the flow rule created by the case designer.

There you see a new flow created with a single assignment shape. Now you can customize this flow as like as you want 🙂

Step 2: Workbasket assignment

How to configure a workbasket assignment?

Note: In our case already an assignment shape is added by case designer.

Include the assignment shape from the Add Shapes icon.

Double-click on the assignment shape to configure the assignment.

Routing – Who should complete this step

Current operator – Route to the current operator who is executing this flow. – Worklist assignment

Operator – In the dropdown, you can select any operator to whom you can assign this assignment – Worklist assignment

Work queue – In the dropdown you can select any workbasket name – Workbasket assignment.

Custom – you can write your custom activity of type Assign and use your own logic. – Worklist / Workbasket assignment.

Use business logic – You can use a decision tree to return the user to whom you can assign – Worklist / Workbasket assignment based on business logic.

In Our case select Work queue and then select the LoanProcessingQueue workbasket name.

Note: As a best practice, do not hardcode work queue names directly, Instead try to make use of DCR functionality. For demo purposes, we will hardcode.

Save the flow rule. Also remember this thing when you deal with assignments.

Assignment – A step that requires human input.

It means the assignment shape-out connector should always use a flow action rule to perform user input. So whenever the flow enters the assignment shape, it waits either in workbasket or worklist until user performs any action 🙂

As of now, we will include some dummy OOTB flow action. ( the only reason is we don’t want to drag this article!!)

Note: You can create your own flow action and section with input fields.

Now let’s test the workbasket assignment

Step 1: Launch the user portal and create a new Loan request case. L-7

Here is the first stage where we collect the information.

Step 2: Click on submit.

The next step is routed appropriately —??? Yeah, its in the workbasket 🙂

Step 3: Check on the Work queues widget and click on the workbasket.

You can see the case L-7 is routed appropriately 🙂

Let’s go back and repeat the steps. Before clicking on Submit in step 2, turn on the tracer.

Remember to check the DB query in tracer settings.

Let’s analyse the tracer output

Step 1: On submitting the collect information, the assignment is completed and then the second stage is entered. Flow ‘LoanProcessing’ starts.

Step 2: Activity of type ‘Route’ – ToWorkbasket is called. This is a router activity and accepts the workbasket name as parameter.

Step 3: Then the flow assign starts with new assignment creation.

How Pega saves the assignment?

Pega persists the assignment.

It means a new assignment is saved in a dedicated database table.

Step 4: AddAssign activity is called. This activity creates a page ‘newAssignPage’ and saves the details to database table.

Note: Whenever you open an assignment, you can see all the assignment details in the newAssignPage. You can check the content of this page via Clipboard tool.

If you open the Assign-Workbasket class and use test connectivity, You can see it is mapped to pc_assign_workbasket table. It means all assign-workbasket instances will be stored in pc_assign_workbasket table.

Also, note the key of the Assign-Workbasket class.

pxRefObjectKey – pzInsKey of the case.

pxFlowName – In our case LoanProcessing

Remember no two instances can have the same class keys. So what do you understand here?!

It means for a case, you cannot have more than one assignment within a single flow. Let’s put the other way around. A case can have more than one assignment. This paves the way for parallel processing 😉

Finally, in tracer, you can see an insert query was executed in pc_assign_workbasket table.

It’s time to check in database table.

I used the below query

select pxcreatedatetime,pxassignedoperatorid,pxflowname,pxrefobjectkey,pxrefobjectinsname from pc_assign_workbasket where pxRefObjectInsName = ‘L-9’