Built-in Tasks

Concept

Built-in Tasks is a concept feature. It's still being developed and can change before it's released. It's available only when the site's license includes the Concept feature Tasks.

Audience: Low-code Engineers

Skill Prerequisites: Entities, Workflows

General Description

Built-in Tasks gives your applications work that waits for a person: approve a purchase request, check a supplier, confirm a delivery. A task says what has to be done, who should do it, by when, and which records it's about. Everyone sees their tasks in one list, My Tasks, across every application on the site.

You don't build the list, the buttons or the reminders yourself. You define task types in Configuration > Tasks, then create tasks from a workflow, from a lifecycle state, or from a BPMN 2.0 user task. The platform keeps the rules: who may take a task, hand it on, complete or cancel it, and what happens when it's late.

Typical uses:

• An approval or review step in a process, for example a line manager checks a purchase request.
• Work for a team, where any member of a role can take the task.
• A checklist of tasks that a record gets when it enters a lifecycle state, and that moves the record on when they're all done.
• Reminders and escalation when a task is past its due date.

How the Parts Fit Together

Part	What it does	Page
Task types	Define the outcomes, who gets the task, the due date, escalation and the workflows that run on task events.	Task Types
My Tasks	The page where people see and work on their tasks, with a task panel for each task. A record's Tasks tab shows the tasks about that record.	My Tasks
Tasks actions	Create, assign, complete and change tasks from workflows.	Tasks
Checklists	Create tasks when a record enters a lifecycle state, and handle them when it leaves.	Checklists on Lifecycle States
Due dates, escalation and events	Mark late tasks overdue, run escalation steps, and run workflows when a task changes.	Due Dates, Escalation and Events
Tasks data source	Build your own task lists and dropdowns.	Tasks Data Source
BPMN 2.0 user tasks	A BPMN 2.0 workflow creates a task and waits until it's completed or cancelled.	User Tasks

Key Concepts

Task: one unit of work for a person. It has a title, a description, a type, a status, a due date, a priority (Low, Normal, High or Urgent) and the records it's about.

Task type: your definition of a kind of task, such as Purchase check. It sets the outcomes, who gets the task, the due date, the escalation steps and the event workflows. The built-in type General is used for tasks created without a type.

Assignee: the one user responsible for the task now. A task without an assignee is unassigned.

Candidate roles: the roles whose members can take an unassigned task with Assign to me. A task needs an assignee, at least one candidate role, or both. When it has both, the assignee can give it back to the candidate roles with Unassign.

Task administrators: the roles that manage the tasks of a type. They see every task of the type and can reassign, cancel and change the due date. A type names its own Task administrators, or uses the Default task administrators of the Tasks settings, or else the site's Administrators role. Superusers can do everything a Task administrator can.

Delegate: the assignee hands the task to another user. The task remembers who delegated it, and that person keeps seeing it, read-only.

Outcome: what the person picks when they complete a task, such as Approved or Rejected. Each type has its own list.

Attached records: the records a task is about, such as a purchase request. Tasks attach to records through a List of Tasks property on your entity. A task can be attached to several records or to none.

Checklist: the tasks a lifecycle state creates when a record enters it. See Checklists on Lifecycle States.

Task events: every change to a task raises an event, such as Created, Assigned or Completed. A type can run a workflow on each event. See Due Dates, Escalation and Events.

Task Statuses

Every task has the same four statuses. You can't add statuses: what differs between kinds of tasks is the type's list of outcomes.

Status	Meaning	What moves it on
Open	The task is waiting: unassigned, or with an assignee who hasn't started.	Start moves it to In progress. Complete and Cancel close it.
In progress	The assignee has started it.	Complete and Cancel close it. It goes back to Open when the assignee unassigns it, or when a Task administrator reassigns it to roles without an assignee.
Completed	Closed, with an outcome.	Nothing.
Cancelled	Closed without an outcome.	Nothing.

Whether a task has an assignee isn't a status. Assign to me, Unassign, Delegate and Reassign change who has the task, not its status, apart from the two cases above that go back to Open. A completed or cancelled task can't be changed: trying gives a message such as "This task is completed, so you cannot cancel it."

Who Can See a Task

A person sees a task when they are:

• its assignee,
• its creator,
• the person who delegated it, read-only,
• a member of one of its candidate roles, while it's unassigned,
• a Task administrator of its type,
• a superuser.

Everyone else doesn't see it in My Tasks, on a record's Tasks tab, in the Tasks data source or in the Tasks actions. A member of a candidate role stops seeing a task as soon as someone else takes it.

Who Can Do What

What	Who	Where
Assign to me	A member of a candidate role, while the task is unassigned.	Row button; Assign Task to Current User
Unassign	The assignee, when the task has candidate roles and the assignee is a member of one.	Row button; Unassign Task
Start	The assignee, while the task is Open.	Row button; Start Task
Complete	The assignee. A member of a candidate role can complete an unassigned task: it's assigned to them in the same click.	Task panel and row button; Complete Task
Delegate	The assignee, when the task has candidate roles.	Task panel, to another member of the candidate roles; Delegate Task
Reassign	Task administrators of the type.	Task panel; Reassign Task, Assign Task
Cancel task	The creator and Task administrators of the type.	Task panel; Cancel Task
Change due date	Task administrators of the type, and the assignee when the type allows it.	Task panel; Update Task
Edit the title, description or priority	Task administrators of the type.	Update Task
Escalate	Task administrators of the type, and the assignee unless the type turns it off. Only while an escalation step is left.	Task panel; Escalate Task

The rules are the same everywhere: in My Tasks, on a record's Tasks tab and in the Tasks actions. Workflows run by escalation steps run as the system, which may do all of the above. See Due Dates, Escalation and Events.

note

A Task administrator doesn't complete tasks for other people. To get a task done by someone else, reassign it.

Setting Up Tasks

1. Make sure the site's license includes the Concept feature Tasks.
2. Open App Builder. When it starts, it sets Tasks up for the site: the built-in Task entity, the General task type, the Task Event and Task Escalation workflow contracts, four ready-made workflows in the System namespace, and the My Tasks page.
3. In Configuration > Tasks, create your task types and check the Tasks settings. See Task Types.
4. On each entity whose records tasks are about, add a property of type List of Tasks (under List of Entities). This lets tasks attach to its records, and gives the record's detail page a Tasks tab.
5. Create tasks: with the Create Task action in a workflow, with a checklist on a lifecycle state, or with a BPMN 2.0 user task.
6. People work on their tasks in My Tasks or on a record's Tasks tab. See My Tasks.

Example: Purchase Requests

The pages of this section use one example, a Purchase Request entity with a lifecycle (Draft, Submitted, Approved, Ordered, Received, Closed) and a Tasks property of type List of Tasks. For the whole walkthrough, see Enterprise Workflows.

• Three task types: Purchase check, Purchase order and Purchase follow-up.
• When a request enters Submitted, its checklist creates Check the supplier of [Title] for the Buyers and, when [Amount] > 5000, Check the budget for [Title] for the Finance Controllers. Approve is refused while either task is open.
• When a request enters Approved, the Buyers get Place the order for [Title]. Completing it runs Order, which moves the request to Ordered.
• A Purchase order task that's late gets its priority raised, then goes to the Procurement Leads, through the type's escalation steps.
• The Buyers see their work in My Tasks. Anyone who opens a request sees, on its Tasks tab, the tasks about it that they're allowed to see.

Licensing

Built-in Tasks needs the Concept feature Tasks in the site's license. That covers everything on these pages, including escalation steps and event workflows. Without it, there's no Tasks menu item in App Builder, the Tasks actions fail as unlicensed, and task lists show no tasks.

Two parts use features of a plan:

• Making your own workflow on the Task Event or Task Escalation contract means choosing the contract in the workflow's settings, which needs Workflow Contracts (Workflows.Contracts), part of the Enterprise plan. The four ready-made workflows are already on their contracts. See Contracts.
• The attached record form in the task panel uses Dynamic Forms (Forms.Dynamic), part of the Standard plan.

Considerations

• Setup runs when App Builder starts. If the license gains Tasks while the site is running and App Builder has already started, restart the site, then open App Builder, so the setup runs.
• Tasks change only through the task rules. Use the Tasks actions, My Tasks and a record's Tasks tab. The Task entity's properties belong to the platform, and generic entity forms and grids don't edit tasks.
• Deleting a record leaves its tasks open. The task loses the link to the record. To cancel the tasks too, use Get Tasks and Cancel Task in the workflow that deletes the record.
• Task types aren't exported with the application yet, and tasks are runtime data that never export.
• There's no user picker yet. Where you name a user, use a user id, username or email.
• The task panel doesn't show a task's history or comments yet, and there's no Automation trigger on task events yet.

Related Pages

Page	Description
Task Types	Define the kinds of tasks and the Tasks settings.
My Tasks	The page and the task panel where people do their tasks.
Checklists on Lifecycle States	Tasks a record gets when it enters a state.
Due Dates, Escalation and Events	Overdue tasks, escalation steps and event workflows.
Tasks Data Source	Task lists and dropdowns of your own.
Tasks	The Tasks actions.
Entity Lifecycle	States and transitions of a record.

Revised 11/12/2026