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Version: 8.10 (unreleased)

Get started with human task orchestration

Beginner Time estimate: 15 minutes

This guide is designed for users who prefer a low-code approach to process automation. You can follow this tutorial using either a local, Self-Managed lightweight setup, or Camunda 8 SaaS.

Camunda 8 allows you to orchestrate processes with human tasks of any complexity. Utilizing user tasks, you can create and assign tasks to users. Then, users can perform their work and enter the necessary data to drive the business process.

This guide introduces you to the basics of human task orchestration. You will create a simple process to decide on dinner, and drive the process flow according to that decision.

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Fill out the form and click Create account.

When you fill out the form, you'll receive a confirmation email. Click on the link to verify your email address.

Log in to your Camunda 8 account​

Log in with the email address and password you used in the previous form, or use the social login buttons. To access the login site directly, navigate to camunda.io.

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After login, you're brought directly to Camunda Hub. From here, you can manage your clusters, workspaces, projects, and other organizational resources.

Take the following five steps to create and run your first process with a human in the loop:

Step 1: Create a new process​

In this step, you will design a process that demonstrates how to route the process flow based on a user decision. In this example, you will create a process to decide what is for dinner.

Create a new file​

  1. In Camunda Hub, navigate to your workspace.
  2. In the workspace, click Create project, and name your project.
  3. In your project, select Create new > BPMN diagram.
  4. In the top navigation, next to New BPMN diagram, click the vertical ellipsis menu, and rename the file Decide on Dinner.
  5. Make sure to name the process itself as well. Click the empty canvas, and specify the process name and technical ID in the properties panel on the right side of the screen. This specifies how the process will appear in other tools of Camunda 8.

Design the process​

note

To run this guide, make sure to be in Implement mode to specify the technical details of the process.

  1. A start event is automatically added to the canvas. Click it to display configuration and append options.

  2. Click the rectangular Append Task icon to append a task.

  3. In the right properties panel, enter a descriptive name for the task, such as Decide what's for dinner. If the properties panel for your task doesn't open automatically, navigate to Window > Toggle Properties Panel to open it manually.

  4. Change the task type by clicking on the element and selecting the Change element menu icon. Select User Task.

  5. Select the user task and click on the diamond-shaped icon to append an exclusive gateway. The gateway allows you to route the process flow differently, depending on conditions.

  6. Select the gateway and append a task by clicking the task icon. Repeat it to create a second process flow. Name the tasks based on what the user decides to eat: in this case, we've named ours Prepare chicken and Prepare salad.

  7. To route the user to the right task, add expressions to the sequence flows. Sequence flows are represented by arrows connecting the gateway to the tasks. To add an expression, click on a sequence flow to view the properties panel, and open the Condition section.

  8. Verify the sequence flows have the following expressions: meal="Chicken" on one side, and meal="Salad" on the other. You will define the variable meal later when designing a form for the user task.

    Example of a conditional expression

  9. Connect the split process flows again. Append another exclusive gateway to one of the tasks. Select the other task and drag the arrow-shaped sequence flow tool to connect it to the gateway.

  10. Select the gateway and add an end event to your process, denoted by the circle with the thick outline.

Don't worry about saving your process diagram. Every change you make is automatically saved.

note

New to BPMN or want to learn more? Visit our BPMN cheat sheet for an overview of all BPMN symbols. Variables are part of a process instance and represent the data of the instance. To learn more about these values, variable scope, and input/output mappings, visit our documentation on variables.

Step 2: Design a form​

You have now designed the process. To allow the user to make the decision, you will now design a form. Forms can be added to user tasks and start events to capture user input, and the user input can be used to route the process flow, to make calls to APIs, or to orchestrate your services.

  1. Select the user task you created in Step 1.

  2. In the floating menu, click the link icon. A menu expands that allows you to create a new form.

    Annotation to open the form menu

  3. Click Create new form. A form will be created and opened in the form editor. The form is automatically named.

  4. In the left Components pane, under Presentation, click and drag the Text view component to the empty form.

    Dragging a component to a form

  5. On the right side of the modeling interface, in the properties panel, open the General section, and enter a Text value, such as What's for dinner?.

  6. In the left Components pane, under Selection, click and drag the Radio group component to the form. In the properties panel, enter the following:

    • Field label: Meal*
    • Key: meal. The key maps to a process variable. The value of the component will be stored in this variable, and it can be read by the process that uses this form. You use meal here because you already used this key for the conditions you set up in the process.
    Defining a radio group's name and key

  7. Scroll down to the Static options section of the properties panel to add radio options. Since there are two options for the dinner, add an extra value by clicking on the plus sign. Enter the value Chicken with the same label as Chicken and enter the value Salad with the label as Salad in the other value. The meal="<OPTION>" conditions you configured earlier are case-sensitive. Make sure the values you set here match those exactly.

    Defining a radio group's static option values

Once the form is designed, verify it's linked properly in your process:

  1. Navigate to the process you created in Step 1.
  2. Select the user task. Click the form link icon to open the form menu.
  3. Verify the task is linked to your new form.

Step 4: Run your process​

Your process is now ready to run. Given its human-centric nature, it is well suited to be run in Tasklist. In order to make it accessible from Tasklist, the process must be deployed first.

tip

Human-centric processes involving user tasks seamlessly unfold within Tasklist, offering a cost-effective orchestration solution for human work with forms. However, the versatility of these processes extends beyond Tasklist, encompassing various alternative methods and applications. For instance, users can be redirected to external applications to fulfill tasks, bespoke task applications can be developed for any domain, or interactions with the physical world can be captured through event signals from sensors and IoT devices.

Deploy and test run​

If you have not yet configured a cluster to deploy to, you'll see a notification. You must configure at least one cluster before moving on.

  1. At the top right of the modeling interface, click Deploy & run to deploy the process to your cluster.
  2. Select a target cluster.
  3. Under Resources, select All resources. Your project contains two files: the BPMN process diagram and the linked form. This option deploys both together. In other contexts, it might make sense to deploy Only this resource for individual files.
  4. Click Deploy & run.

This deploys both project resources and starts a process instance.

tip

Other options to run a process are to start it via Tasklist, test it in the Test mode, or call it via the API or an inbound trigger. Read more about run options.

Check successful start in Operate​

  1. At the top right of the screen, a notification message confirms the instance started. Click View process instance. If you miss the notification message, next to Deploy & run, open the chevron menu, and click View process in Operate:

    Run action in Modeler

  2. In Operate, you will see a visualization of the running process instance. Notice that a green token is waiting at the user task. This means that a task is waiting to be worked on in Tasklist.

    Process instance monitoring in Operate
tip

In production, Operate is used to monitor both long-running and straight-through, high-throughput processes. In development environments, use Operate to confirm if the process flow works as expected. For faster in-place validation during development, use the Test mode.

Step 5: Complete a user task​

When the process instance arrives at the user task, a new user task instance is created at Zeebe. The process instance stops at this point and waits until the user task is completed. Applications like Tasklist can be used by humans to complete these tasks. In this last step, you will open Tasklist to run the user task you created.

tip

While it may originally seem like the goal of automating a process is to remove humans entirely, efficiently allocating work through user tasks can be even more beneficial. Within this example, we've included a form to demonstrate the completion of a user task.

Using the Zeebe or Tasklist API, many other ways to complete a user task are possible, such as redirecting to another application to complete the task, or even listening to IoT devices to capture human interaction with the real world via job workers.

  1. In the top navigation, on the far left side next to Operate, click the Camunda components menu icon.
  2. Click Tasklist.

In Tasklist:

  1. On the left, you will notice a list of tasks. There should be one open task Decide what's for dinner. Click this task to open it in the detail view.

  2. In the detail view, the form you created in Step 2 appears. It is read only since this task is currently unassigned. You have to claim the task to work on it. Click Assign to me to claim the task.

  3. Select one of the radio options.

  4. Click Complete Task to submit the form.

    complete a human task in Tasklist

  5. To verify your task completion, you can filter by Completed tasks in the left task list panel.

You can now navigate back to Operate and notice the process instance has continued as the token has moved forward to the selected option.

The token moves through the exclusive gateway (also called the XOR gateway), and is used to model the decision in the process. When the execution arrives at this gateway, all outgoing sequence flows are evaluated in the order in which they have been defined. The sequence flow which condition evaluates to ‘true’ is selected for continuing the process.

In this case, the token will move through the gateway and (according to the conditional expressions we outlined earlier) to the selected dinner based on the Decide what's for dinner user task we completed. If we select Chicken, the token moves forward to Prepare chicken. If we select Salad, the token moves forward to Prepare salad.

Operate showing the completed process instance

Wrap up​

At this point, you've successfully crafted a human-centered process that routes the process flow based on a decision made by a user.

A core value of Camunda 8 lies in the combination of automation and human interaction. The same pattern applies when an AI agent produces the result a person acts on: the user task, form, and gateway you built here work the same way, whichever kind of step supplied the data.

Continue with the following resources to learn about intelligent task assignments, flexible forms to capture data and decisions, operational insights to refine task efficiency, and pathways to publish your processes to users via Tasklist or even publicly.

Don't want to build the process yourself? Click this button to create it from a template in Camunda 8 SaaS, or sign up first.


Additional resources and next steps​