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Put your tasks on a screen

Goal​

Put the reader's own task list on a screen you drew — usually an app's home page — so opening the app is opening their work.

Why this exists​

A person's tasks have always been reachable: one press on the tray in the Platform Shell's top bar. Reachable is not the same as in front of you. A home page is where somebody starts their day, and what they start it with is what they have been asked to do — so the list belongs on the page, beside the figures and the shortcuts, not behind a button in the corner.

It is the same inbox, not a copy of it. The count in the top bar and the rows on your screen are one list, read once.

Steps​

  1. Open your Studio app in the designer and select the screen.

  2. Drag Components → My tasks onto it. It arrives panel-sized; put it where you want it and size it as you would any other box.

  3. In the Screen tab there is one field:

    FieldIs
    At mosthow many rows to show. Leave it empty for everything waiting.

  4. Save and publish.

That is the whole of it. There is nothing else to fill in, because there is nothing else the drawing could say: the columns, the ordering and what a row press does are the platform's, exactly as they are for a grid or a date picker.

What the reader sees​

The same table the Shell's own task list shows — which process, what step, what it is for, whose it is, when it arrived, and how long it has been waiting — and pressing a row takes the task and opens what it is about, just as pressing it in the tray does.

What it does not have​

  • No toolbar. The Shell's list has Open, Hand on, Put back and Refresh over a ticked row, because that list is where somebody goes to triage. A panel on a page is glanced at, so a row press opens the task and there is nothing else on it. The tray is still one press away.
  • No filtering by process. The panel is the inbox: everything this person has been asked to do, across every process in the environment.
  • Nothing in Preview. The panel says This host has no task list, honestly — a preview has no environment and no sign-in behind it, so there is no inbox to read. The same is true of a screen served as a portal. Publish and open it in the Shell to see it with rows in it.

Switch the app's task support on​

Set Takes part in business processes on the model-driven app that hosts the screen. Without it the panel still lists tasks, but opening one has nowhere to say that a task is in hand — no tray count, and no bar along the bottom naming it with a Decide button. The two are halves of one feature.

Import the sample first​

studio-tasks-on-a-home-screen is this, working, with a one-step process to fill the panel. Import it, give yourself the Errand runner role, sign out and sign in again, create an errand, and the task appears on the screen.

Troubleshooting​

The panel is empty. Almost always the role: your inbox is built from the roles your sign-in carries, so a role granted into a session already open reaches nothing. Sign out and back in.

It says this host has no task list. You are looking at a preview or a portal rather than at the app in the Platform Shell.

A row says Taken and will not open. Somebody else got to it first. A task offered to a role sits in every candidate's list until one of them opens it, and it stays visible afterwards so you can see where it went.