I was thinking if there shut be a excel task activity, In my current work, there are a lot of people that uses Excel and they treat the spreadshet like a database, so its very dificult that thesse users, can think that any app its better than Excel.
For these users I think Its better to have a task, where we can provide a query and export the data returned by the query to a spreadsheet, so the user can get statistical data and do some analitics, reports.
For example: In the case of user request process, If we provide in a spreadsheet all the execiutions of the process by user and date, the rh analyst could work on the spreadsheet to do his month report.
Its just an idea, but in my experience the organizations always use a spreadsheet system, for doing a lot of reports, graphs, analisys.
These kind of additional activity types are always great to have in the Flowable Engine. What will be challenging is to come up with a good generic implementation of this Excel activity class.
You could set the SQL query or similar in a process variable.
It should be quite straightforward to perform the query in a java class and transform the output to a csv/xls/openwhatever file.
You can attach that file as a document to the next task, store it on a network drive, mail it,…
Other people are working on a REST activity. Once that is done, you could publish to a bus via REST and have the bus update the spreadsheet if available on a shared / network drive.
I was thinking maybe In a generic class that generate a excel report with some library like jasper, that receive the query to contruct the spreadsheet.
I think we can define some standar queris for this task, for example view historical data of a proces y user, time from start to finish, get most trouble task, etc.