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About User Interact Steps

The user interact step allows application designers to design and configure the flow of Siebel views within an application. Siebel Workflow guides end users through a specified flow of Siebel views based on the users' actions, or executes a specified set of actions. This flow can be modified as business rules change.

The user interact step has the following behaviors:

• The user interact step brings up the required view. The user interact step runs in the user session. It sends a request to the Siebel Web Engine to build the view.

  NOTE:  Only one view can be built at a time. You cannot combine a user interact step with another action, such as bringing up a message box or building another view simultaneously.

• The user interact step waits for a run-time event to resume processing. It waits in the memory of the user session. In cases where there is no run-time event defined, the workflow process will continue to the end.
• If, after a user interact step, the user manually navigates out of the view, the workflow process remains in the memory of the user session. The process is deleted when the user session is terminated or when another workflow process is instantiated in the same user session.

NOTE:  Workflows running in the Workflow Process Manager server component should not contain user interact steps. That is, if the workflow is running in background mode or in batch mode, it cannot include user interact steps. If the Workflow Process Manager encounters a user interact step, an error will result.

CAUTION:  If using the workflow persistence feature with user interact steps, note that workflows with user interact steps should be persisted only for debugging purposes. A persisted workflow that contains a user interact step can resume in a different user session based on which user generated the event, causing unintended behavior. For more information on persistence, see About Workflow Persistence.

The User Interact step has been enhanced to take process properties as input arguments. In this way, you can dynamically set view names as you design your interactive workflow processes. The view name property is set in the view field (an unbounded picklist) of the User Interact step.

For more information on user interact steps, see the following sections:

• Defining a User Interact Step
• Defining User Interact Next Step Branches
• Defining Conditions and Values for Branches, Decision Steps, and User Interact Steps