Categories

Start, Case, and Task Categories

You can assign a Start, Case, or Task to a category. A category is a structured String (e.g., Finance/Invoices). It categorizes Starts, Cases, or Tasks into a hierarchical structure. It is an important identification attribute besides the name of a Start, Case, or Task.

The Category API allows getting localized information from the CMS. For example, the name of the category Finance/Invoices is stored in the CMS at /Categories/Finance/Invoices/name.

To display a tooltip or an icon for a category on start lists, configure the tooltip and cssIcon in the CMS (i.e.,``/Categories/Finance/Invoice/cssIcon``).

The following example shows a simple use of a category on the Case level. The API on the Task level is identical.

ivy.case.setCategoryPath("Finance/Invoices");

String categoryName = ivy.case.getCategory().getName(); // EN: "Invoices", DE: "Rechnungen"
String categoryPath = ivy.case.getCategory().getPath(); // EN: "Finance/Invoices", DE: "Finanzen/Rechnungen"

Tip

The project WorkflowDemos demonstrates the use of start, case, and task categorization. The case category serves to categorize the overall process (i.e.,Business Case). The task category serves to categorize a single unit of work, or a set of units of work. Because of the separation of case and task categorization, you can handle even complex use cases.

An example: In a mid-sized company, the process to request an address change for a customer exists in multiple forms. There is one in the customer portal and one for partner agencies. The process executed by the customer portal has the case category ‘CustomerPortal/AddressChange’. The process executed by a partner agency has the case category ‘Partner/Customers/AddressChange’. Both processes invoke a task to have a user or department validate the address. This user or department also does the final address verification. So, in both cases, this task has the category ‘AddressVerification’. This allows the user or department to filter tasks no matter where they have originated.