Chapter 53. Case roles

Case roles provide an additional layer of abstraction for user participation in case handling. Roles, users, and groups are used for different purposes in case management.

The following example illustrates how the preceding case management concepts apply to a hotel reservation with the following information:

The Guest role assignment affects the specific work of the associated case and is unique to all case instances. Every case instance will have its own role assignments. The number of users or groups that can be assigned to a role is limited by the case Cardinality, which is set during role creation in the process designer and case definition. For example, the hotel reservation case has only one guest while the IT_Orders sample project has two suppliers of IT hardware.

When roles are defined, ensure that roles are not hard-coded to a single set of people or groups as part of case definition and that they can differ for each case instance. This is why case role assignments are important.

Role assignments can be assigned or removed when a case starts or at any time when a case is active. Although roles are optional, use roles in case definitions to maintain an organized workflow.

Roles are assigned to users or groups and authorized to perform tasks when a case instance is started.