When would you use APEX Human Tasks in a Flows for APEX Workflow?

Sometimes, your workflow is really simple - you just need a simple approval from a manager, and you don’t need to control your business process from a workflow engine. But there are other cases when you have a more complex business process that includes management approvals, sometimes going up to 4 or 5 levels of management, and sometimes going up multiple management hierarchies in parallel before everyone approves!

APEX Human Tasks as part of a BPMN workflow in Flows for APEX gives you the best of both worlds. You get to use the rapid generation features of APEX tasks, including visually appealing, auto-generated Task List and Task Detail pages while being able to include these in a BPMN-based workflow that allows parallel execution of approval chains modelled with the industry standard BPMN 2.0 that your business analysts and managers already know.

How are APEX Human Tasks integrated into a Flows for APEX workflow?

At its simplest, a BPMN workflow breaks a business process down into tasks, events, and gateways. Tasks can be performed by a human at a computer (a user task), a script ( a script task), by calling some service (a service task), etc.. Processes either trigger or wait for various Events to occur, such as sending a message, waiting for and receiving a message, detecting a process error, etc. And Gateways control the flow of the process between tasks and events, allowing the process to change direction (an Exclusive Gateway), go in multiple parallel paths (a Parallel Gateway), or conditional parallel paths (an Inclusive Gateway), or react to the first of several events occurring.

The BPMN User Task is used for Human Tasks. In Flows for APEX, a user task can be implemented in your application by calling an APEX page that you have built ( an APEX Page Task), by calling an APEX Human Task (an APEX Approval or Action Task), or using our development-less option using a dynamic Simple Form, where the items to be collected from the user are defined as a simple JSON definition, and the input form is dynamically created by the application at run time without having to define an APEX page.

You can test drive our Expense Claim Demo App that contains all types of user tasks. The Expense Claim Demo App is shipped with the Flows for APEX Community Edition v25.1 software distribution - meaning it can be installed in under a minute.

So what’s new in Flows for APEX 25.1?

We’ve added several enhancements to our integration with APEX Human Tasks. Here’s the list of new features, and we’ll then take these one by one to show what they do.

• Task Assignment from the Flows for APEX Workflow.

• Business Admin assignment from Flows for APEX.

• Better cleanup when tasks are cancelled.

• New Task Action plugin to return task state and approval outcomes.

• Support for ‘Originator can Approve’.

• Visibility of APEX task information from the Flow Monitor.

• Removed Group Assignment for APEX Tasks until supported.

In addition, we’ve revised and extended the documentation on how to configure the generated APEX Task List to combine tasks from Flows for APEX, APEX Workflow, and APEX Human Tasks. This is the subject of another blog post Unifying all Tasks: Integrating Flows for APEX into the APEX Task List

Let’s look at these improvements in more detail.

Task Assignment from the Flows for APEX Workflow.

If a task forms part of a larger business process, it’s likely that the workflow engine may often have a better understanding of who should be assigned the task. So you want the workflow engine to be able to set the potential owners for a task, and you’d like to be able to determine this assignment in the workflow definition, rather than having a set of rules inside the task.

The APEX Human Task API doesn’t allow us to pass the list of potential owners into a task when it is created, and only the task Business Admin can add or remove potential owners once it has been created. But the task can be defined to evaluate a PL/SQL expression to set potential owners (and business admins), and so we have provided a new Flows for APEX API call that allows you to ask Flows for APEX who the potential owners should be. This call is:

    flow_api_pkg.get_task_potential_owners ( p_process   in flow_processes.prcs_id%type,
                                             p_subflow   in flow_subflows.sbfl_id%type,
                                             p_step_key  in flow_subflows.sbfl_step_key%type
                                            );

This will return a list of the task’s potential owners from Flows for APEX, with the comma delimiter required for APEX Tasks.

If you were using APEX approvals with Flows for APEX in earlier versions, we recommended passing PROCESS_ID as a parameter into your APEX task. From 25.1 onwards and to use these new functions and the new plug-in (details below) you should now pass PROCESS_ID, SUBFLOW_ID, and STEP_KEY as parameters into your APEX task. (Sorry - we need all three to be able to unambiguously refer to the task before the APEX Task ID is assigned!)

The task potential owners can de defined as part of the BPMN user task definition, and can be defined as:

• a static value

• the contents of a Flows for APEX process variable

• a SQL Query returning a single or multiple values

• a PL/SQL expression

• a PL/SQL function body

Business Admin Assignment from the Flows for APEX Workflow

Similar to the above description of how and why to set a task’s Potential Owners from Flows for APEX, we can now also set the Task’s Business Administrator from Flows for APEX, starting in Flows for APEX 25.1. The Business Admin is an important person - as only the Business Admin can add or remove potential owners, and only the Business Admin and the Task Initiator can cancel a task. Having an appropriate Business Admin set from the workflow definition allows intelligent choices of Business Admin based on the context of the task; large organisations might want to have a business admin in the same group as the task assignee, or if the approval is expected to occur quickly, it might be a duty manager or someone not on vacation.

The Business admin can now be defined in the BPMN diagram in the properties panel for a BPMN User Task that calls an APEX Human Task. Like the definition of a potential. owner, the business admin can be defined as a static value, from a process viable, or from a query, expression or function body.

It’s important that a Business Administrator is defined, and that Flows for APEX knows who it is - as we need to know in order to be able to cancel any tasks that need clearing up after a process is deleted, terminated or reset, or if it is cancelled as a result of a BPMN interruption or some other process flow issue. In order to help you ensure that there is always an admin defined, you can now also specify a process-level default business administrator in the bpmn:process definition in your process diagram. And to be extra sure, you can also define a Flows for APEX system-wide business administrator as a configuration parameter default_apex_business_admin in the configuration form on the Flows for APEX Application.

Similar to setting a task potential owner, the task business admin can be set in your APEX Task Definition to callback to Flows for APEX to get. the Business Admins, this time using the API call flows_api_pkg.get_task_business_admins. Note the extra two parameters, giving you the option to include either the diagram-level default admin or the system-wide admin from the configuration parameters. Here’s the syntax:

flow_api_pkg.get_task_business_admins ( p_process in flow_processes.prcs_id%type,
                                        p_subflow in flow_subflows.sbfl_id%type, 
                                        p_step_key in flow_subflows.sbfl_step_key%type,
                                        p_add_diagram_admin  in boolean default false,
                                        p_add_instance_admin in boolean default false);

With the Business Admin defined and known to Flows for APEX, we are now able to have our next new feature…

Better Cleanup of Cancelled Tasks

An APEX Human Task can only be cancelled by its initiator or one of its Business Administrators. So in previous releases, approval tasks were often left behind if the process that created them was deleted, reset or terminated, or if the task was cancelled due to an interruption or its parent sub process being terminated. With Flows for APEX v25.1, we should be able to clean up any of these orphan tasks.

When an APEX Human Task requires cancellation from the workflow, we first attempt to cancel it in the current user session. This only succeeds if the current user initiated the task or is a business admin for the task. If this is not successful, Flows for APEX will now user the database scheduler to run a job in a background process which creates an APEX session as a Business Admin, and cancels the task. If there is not a valid business admin defined, instead it will create an APEX session as the initiator, and cancel the task.

For. those wanting more technical detail, we create a DBMS_SCHEDULER program , named APEX_FLOW_CANCEL_APEX_TASK_P as part of installation or migration to Flows for APEX v25.1, and then run an immediate JOB using that program to do the deletion. The Flows for APEX user requires the CREATE JOB database system privilege in order to create this and to run timers.

New APEX Task Action Plugin - ‘Flows for APEX - Return APEX Human Task State and Outcome’

We’ve had an APEX Task Action Plugin available since Flows for APEX v22.1 that returns the Approval result (‘Flows for APEX - Return to Flows for APEX’) - but in Flows for APEX v25.1 we’ve created a new and enhanced plugin with slightly different interface named ‘Flows for APEX - Return APEX Human Task State and Outcome’.

Firstly, for those of you with applications using the old plugin, don’t worry! The old plugin and its interface still exist are unchanged — but we think that you should change to the new plugin sometime soon, once you have 25.1 installed and running! We’ll keep it in 25.1 and the following release, but likely remove it in a subsequent release.

Using the new plugin, your APEX Human Task should have Task Parameters that include at least the three Flows for APEX state parameters, PROCESS_ID, SUBFLOW_ID, and STEP_KEY.

Like the old plugin, the new plugin can return the Outcome of an APEX Human Task that has an Outcome (that’s currently an Approval Task, which has Outcomes of APPROVED or REJECTED).

In addition, the new plugin also returns the State Code from an APEX Human Task. This allows you to use the plugin to tell its controlling Flows for APEX workflow that the APEX Human Task is COMPLETED, or that it has been CANCELLED or that it has EXPIRED*. Unfortunately, you can’t currently define an action if it has ERRORED.

Configuring each of the Task Actions in APEX is simple - we just need to select action type to use the `Flows for APEX - Return APEX Human Task State and Outcome [plug-in]’ and the default values should work for you. The Task Action configuration should look like this:

Note that EXPIRED is only relevant if you have defined an expiration policy in the APEX Human Task definition. Note also that there is an open APEX bug in 24.1 and 24.2 such that the Expiration task action does not correctly report its expired state. Until this is fixed (which we understand should be in 25.1), you can write your own PL/SQL code instead of using the plugin. Just set the Action Type to Execute PL/SQL and use the following pl/SQL code:

begin
    flow_api_pkg.return_task_state_outcome 
    ( p_process_id => :PROCESS_ID
    , p_subflow_id => :SUBFLOW_ID
    , p_step_key   => :STEP_KEY
    , p_apex_task_id => :APEX$TASK_ID
    , p_state_code => 'EXPIRED' -- have to hard code this due to APEX bug
    , p_outcome => null
    );
end;

In Flows for APEX 24.1 and earlier, a task that had been cancelled, errored, or expired meant that you had a stuck Flows for APEX process instance. Now, if you define Task Actions to pass the task state back to Flows. for APEX, the workflow engine can react appropriately as follows.

Support for ‘Initiator Can Approve’

Until APEX v24.1, the separation of duties rule that ‘a task initiator couldn’t approve his own approval request’ was strictly enforced in APEX Approval Tasks. However, Oracle changed this in APEX 24.1, allowing a task to be able to ignore this rule if it was defined in the task definition, was set at task creation time, or subsequently allowed by a business admin.

In Flows for APEX v25.1, you can now set this parameter from Flows for APEX for a specific Human Task instance, and this will be passed through to the APEX Human Task at task creation time.

Removal of (non functioning) Group Task Assignment

APEX Human Tasks can currently only to assigned to named APEX users, and can’t be assigned to a group or a role. In earlier versions of Flows for APEX, we allowed you to define group / role assignment roles — which we couldn’t process. So in Flows for APEX v25.1, we’ve taken the Group Task Assignment away for BPMN User Tasks of type APEX Human Task. I hope that we can put them back at some future date when APEX can do something with them.

Viewing Task Status and Meta-data from the Flow Viewer

In the past, once an APEX Human Task was created, it became a bit of a black hole to the Flows for APEX administrator. After giving the task to APEX to manage, we didn’t provide much information to you until the task had been completed, and control passed back to Flows for APEX. You needed to run your own queries on the APEX tasks meta data - which, being Oracle, is not difficult. But we’ve made all of this much easier in Flows for APEX v25.1! If you are looking at the status and other information about a step in the Flow Viewer (right click on the task in the Flow Viewer in Flow Monitor to get a pop-up window showing the step definition, step events, step errors, etc. Now, if the step is an APEX Human Task, you will see its Task ID in the Step Events tab; clicking on the Task ID brings up a modal window showing the task meta data, status, current task assignment, and task history — so that you can see the current status of the task right from Flows for APEX.

From using this feature while we created and ran many APEX Human Tasks during development and testing of Flows for APEX v25.1, I find that this makes APEX Human Tasks so much easier to use, and makes them feel integrated into Flows.

Editions

All of the features described above have been added to Flows for APEX v25.1, now available, in both the Community Edition (open source, free of charge on a MIT licence) and to the Enterprise Edition (supported edition with additional functionality, available from Flowquest). Development of features like this are possible because of the development resources that come from the Enterprise Edition - so please consider upgrading to the Enterprise Edition if your organisation is getting significant value from Flows for APEX or would benefit from having product support!

Summary

We hope that this set of enhancements will make APEX Human Tasks easier to use, feel much more integrated, and become more powerful than they have been to-date. We can’t wait to hear what you have been able to do by combining APEX Human Tasks into your Flows for APEX workflows.

More Information

For more information on this topic, see the product documentation.

Need advice or further information or advice - schedule an introductory chat with Richard.

The Flows for APEX team is currently finalizing version 25.1, which will be available this summer in both Community and Enterprise Editions.

This release introduces significant enhancements to AI integration, workflow control, and developer experience.

AI Service Task

With enterprise adoption of AI accelerating, how can AI-powered decision-making and document generation be integrated into your business processes?

The new AI Service Task allows calls to generative AI services (e.g., GPT) as part of a BPMN workflow. You can incorporate RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and vector search to craft AI prompts based on real-time business context. The AI’s structured output can drive workflow decisions, generate documents, or produce dynamic content for use during execution.

Process Suspend, Resume, and Rewind (EE only)

Real-world processes are never perfect—errors, data issues, or incorrect decisions may require intervention. The new suspend/resume functionality allows administrators to:

• Temporarily pause a running process

• Rewind to a previous task, gateway, or subprocess

• Edit process variables or remove execution paths

• Fully resume execution from the corrected point

While suspended, tasks and timers are frozen and inbound messages are queued. All admin interventions are logged for audit and diagnostics.

APEX Human Task Enhancements

Flows for APEX supports multiple implementations for BPMN UserTasks, including APEX Human Tasks, Simple Forms, and custom APEX pages.

New enhancements to our APEX Human Task integration include:

• Dynamic task assignment of owners and business admins from within the BPMN model

• A new Task Action plugin to relay task outcomes, expirations, and cancellations directly to the workflow engine

• Automated cleanup of orphaned tasks from cancelled workflows

These improvements provide tighter integration between user interactions and workflow execution.

Granular Event Logging

Logging is now more configurable. You can:

• Define logging granularity per process

• Enable debug-level logging on specific instances

• Capture and store detailed event-level audit trails for each process step

This helps developers and operations teams with diagnostics, compliance, and continuous improvement.

Simple Process Starter Enhancements

Introduced in 2024, the Simple Process Starter provides end users with a centralized "process hub"—a place to launch new processes, view task status, and manage their workflow responsibilities.

Version 25.1 brings improved task visibility and usability refinements to help users quickly find and launch the right processes.

Queued BPMN Message Flow (EE only)

BPMN Message Flows enable communication between processes—whether within the same APEX instance or across remote systems via REST.

In version 25.1, the Enterprise Edition introduces queued message handling. Inbound messages are queued and processed in sequence, improving reliability and scalability of inter-process communication.

Additional Enhancements

• Admins can now force a “next step” after an error (EE only)

• Error Boundary Events now supported on PL/SQL Script Tasks

• BPMN diagrams can now define instance naming rules

• Availability of Process Diagram and instance status data via REST.

Platform Requirements

Flows for APEX v25.1 requires:

• Oracle Database 19c or newer

• Oracle APEX 24.1 or newer

These requirements align with Oracle’s current support policies, which no longer support older APEX versions.

Licensing

Features marked EE only are exclusive to the Enterprise Edition, available from Flowquest Limited. The Enterprise Edition includes product support and is recommended for significant production use.

Looking Ahead

Potential areas of future development after v25.1 include:

• Extensible service task connector interface for connecting workflows to other services such as, for example, APEX Office Print, Docusign, OCI Object Storage, and AI services.

• AI-assisted BPMN modeling for validation, generation, and optimization of models

• Administration tools for managing large-scale Flows for APEX environments

• DMN-style Business Rules for automating business rules in a process.

Note: Inclusion in this roadmap does not guarantee delivery or timeline. Many of these features will be exclusive to the Enterprise Edition. Your support of the Enterprise Edition directly contributes to the continued development and maintenance of both editions.

Inside your script PL/SQL, you can set process variables using the process variable PL/SQL api (documented at https://flowsforapex.org/latest/procvar-api/#procedure-set_var ).

How do you get the current process_id and other current state variables that you need as parameters for set_var? There are two ways to access the key items of process state, like process_id within your code - you can reference them as package variables in the flow_globals package, or you can bind them (and any other process variable) using bind syntax. Let’s take a look at how we do that.

1. Using flow_globals package variables.

The key process state variables, such as process_id are available to use in your PL/SQL script as package variables in the flow_globals package. You reference these in your script as, for example, flow_globals.process_id.

These are the items that are available as flow_globals. Some of these are only relevant in more advanced use, but I’ve included a full list for completeness — so don’t worry if you don’t understand what they all represent!

So you can set process variables in your PL/SQL Script by doing something like this...

declare
    my_content_string varchar2(20) := 'Some Text';
begin
    flow_process_vars.set_var ( pi_prcs_id   => flow_globals.process_id,
                                pi_var_name  => 'My_Process_Variable',
                                pi_scope     => flow_globals.scope,
                                pi_vc2_value => my_content_string);
end;

So here is a mini process definition to show this...

and when that runs, you can see that the process variable My_Process_Variable is correctly created and set to Some Text ...

2. Bind Syntax

   Alternatively, you can bind the key process state variables into your code. In this case, we prefix the variable name with :F4A$ when we reference it. Then you turn on binding with the ‘Allow Binding’ switch, and then select Bind Process Variables on the selector.

   Any other process variables that have been defined in the process instance can also be bound using this syntax. For example, I could reference a process variable empno into my script task as :F4A$empno'.

   Our code to set a process variable, now references the process_id and scope using bind syntax like this…

declare
    my_content_string_2  varchar2(20) := 'Some More Text';
begin
    flow_process_vars.set_var ( pi_prcs_id   => :F4A$process_id,
                                pi_var_name  => 'My_Process_Variable_2',
                                pi_scope     => :F4A$scope,
                                pi_vc2_value => my_content_string_2
                              );
end;

When I add this into my process diagram, I turn on ‘Allow Binding’ and select ‘Bind Process Variables’ in the Flow Modeler like this…

And here is the result after an instance of the process runs…. Our process variable My_Process_Variable_2 was correctly set to Some More Text.

Summary

Flows for APEX contains a process variable system, allowing processes variables to be set from within user’s PL/SQL code using the process variable PL/SQL API. Where you need to supply process state, like the process_id, this is easily available through flow_globals or as bind parameters.

For more information on Flows for APEX, see the product documentation at flowsforapex.org.

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) representations of a business process appear to the user as a process diagram, showing tasks, events, and gateways that control the process direction. Optionally these diagrams can contain swim lanes showing who (person or organisation) is responsible for each process step, and can show how a process interacts with other processes and/or other organizations.

Under the covers, these BPMN diagrams are stored as an XML document, containing two main sections - one defining the process logic, and a second defining the diagram layout.

Current Gen AI models are good at understanding XML documents, have been trained on material including the BPMN standard, the many books written about BPMN, and the countless number of conference papers written by business consultants over the last two decades. The good news is that you don’t have to stay awake reading all of them - Gen AI has already read them and can help us!

What can Gen AI do with a BPMN Diagram?

1. Explaining Diagrams

The first thing that GenAI can do is to explain the diagram to us in business English. Or any other language, but I’ll come back to that later!

The AI models are good at converting the structure and text contained in the BPMN model to a good, well-structured explanation of the process in a diagram. They seem to be good at inferring background purpose and concepts in a model, and describing them - at a high level, or in as much detail as you want.

Let’s take an example. I have a contrived business process built for a demo that conducts annual employment verification checks for staff. The process is started by HR, and then carried out by HR and line managers. Here’s the top level diagram …

This diagram uses a subprocess for the ‘review department’ task. If I click on the blue arrow icon underneath ‘review department’, I can see the detail of this subprocess…

And so I can see that the process for each department is to identify staff needing a review, that conduct that review — the details of which are contained in a sub process, which again I can see by clicking on the blue arrow below ‘review staff’.

Now I can see that the process conducts a government employability check and then a salary review by the line manager.

What can AI do? If I click the ‘Ask Flo’ button, we send a subset of the diagram to the AI service, ask ask for a brief summary of the business process. Here’s the response.

This looks like a good summary of the process. For those who aren’t familiar with the intricacies of BPMN, whether APEX developers new to BPMN or business managers new to process modelling, this should be useful.

The AI service is able to answer more detailed questions about the business process or the mechanics of the BPMN diagram. Here is an arbitrary example where we’ve asked for more details on the staff review part of the process using a free text question from the user…

2. Suggesting Process Model Improvements

   The next capability that AI can help us with is suggesting improvements to our model, whether these are technical / process modelling improvements or actual business process improvements.

   

   Our experience is that the suggestions provided by AI also range from the simple / trivial to more complex, less obvious ideas. It’s not always easy to get relevant suggestions from simplified demo processes like our staff review process — but you can see that some of the ideas are good and generally helpful.

3. Model Error Checking

   The next capability is to detect and explain model errors. In the Flows for APEX Process Modeler, we have already included a BPMN linting capability that detects various syntactic errors in your model. Additionally, the AI engine is capable of finding another set of potential errors from its existent knowledge of BPMN and from our training prompt.

   Here’s an error check on our demo model… which appears to be in good order.

   

   We have a class of typical user errors that come from starting parallel sections in a model, which have to all end at the same merging gateway or go to their own end points. When errors in these. rules occur, our experience is that AI is very good at finding the problem, explaining what the problem is, and suggesting ways to change the model to fix the problem. Certainly better than the typical ‘rule X is broken’ style error message!

Describing Message Flow

One of the capabilities of Flows for APEX Enterprise Edition v24.1 is the ability for one process to collaborate with another process, which might be in the same APEX instance or via-REST at a supplier or customer, by sending and receiving messages. This collaboration can start a remote process, subscribe and wait for an incoming message, interrupt a process when a message arrives, or emit a message when a process or sub-process completes. This is process collaboration via BPMN Message Flow.

One of the key design tasks in setting up process collaboration is to design the message definitions to be used in this structured messaging environment. (I’ll write a blog post about this soon). Again AI can help us to describe the messaging defined in a model, pulling information from all of the places where message structure is defined.
Our demo model doesn’t have any messaging in it, so I’ve taken another example here, and given screen shots here of the overall message process and the AI-generated documentation on the message structures.

Here’s a summary of the model for those of you not sure about the BPMN here. (it’s easy to generate this, so why not give it to you….)

Asking AI for a description of the message structures gives us this output…

5. Language Translation

   All of our business process diagrams have been in English so far, but what happens when the diagram is in a language you can’t understand? How can AI help the business manager trying to understand why the business process in the Japanese office isn’t working as they expect? Or how can a support analyst help solve a process problem when it’s 2AM in Tokyo and support has rolled over to the help desk in London?

   Well, the current LLMs are all good at language translation, and we can give AI a model in one language and ask for an explanation in another language.
   Here’s a model that most of us can’t read (…with apologies to those of you who can read Japanese!)…

   

   Where to start? Let’s Ask Flo…

   

   So now we know what the business process is, and how it works! Note that AI gives us the original task names in Japanese, the pronunciation in Romanji (Japanese using Roman characters), and an English translation.

   This capability works well in all of the languages that we have had native speakers review output.

6. Showing off, one of our Flows for APEX users has a requirement to be able to provide output in Welsh language to Welsh users. The AI service can do that** (**to the best of my knowledge, but I can’t read Welsh!)

AI Services

The results above are all created using the OpenAI gpt-4o model. Other models, including the Cohere and OCI AI Service models can understand BPMN to a limited degree, but provide output that is much less full and less reliable than these examples. But as with everything AI, the situation is changing rapidly and other models may be capable of producing this quality of interaction soon.

How Do I Use This?

The Ask Flo GenAI Assistant is a feature in Flows for APEX Enterprise Edition v24.1, which is now available on a supported, annual subscription basis from Flowquest. (www.flowquest.net).

The Ask Flo AI feature requires APEX 24.1 and a OpenAI API key with pre-paid balance. (Don’t be deterred by the cost of using the AI service - our work to optimise the parts of the BPMN diagram that is sent to BPMN reduces the number of token used, and so the AI running costs of this are not expensive for the benefit provided. My token usage today to create all of the examples in this blog, along with a several other discarded queries, cost under US$0.02).