Manipulating Human Tasks (for testing)

A few months ago, while working on a BPM migration, I had the need to look at the status of human tasks, and to manipulate them – essentially to just have a single user take random actions on them at some interval, to help drive a set of processes that were being tested.

To do this, I wrote a little utility called httool.  It reuses some of the core domain classes from my custom worklist sample (with minimal changes to make it a remote client instead of a local one).

I have not got around to documenting it yet, but it is pretty simple and fairly self explanatory.  So I thought I would go ahead and share it with folks, in case anyone is interested in playing with it.

You can get the code from my ci-samples repository on java.net:

git clone git://java.net/ci4fmw~ci-samples

It is in the httool directory.

I do plan to get back to this “one day” and enhance it to be more intelligent – target particular task types, update the payload, follow a set of “rules” about what action to take – so that I can use it for more driving more interesting test scenarios.  If anyone is feeling generous with their time, and interested, please feel free to join the java.net project and hack away to your heart’s content.