Hi Appian Team and Community,
We’re designing a generic, audit-compliant task module to support multiple business processes—KYC, retail and corporate loan origination, ESG, and more. Before finalizing our architecture, I’m weighing two approaches for task management:
Uses process reports and task assignment rules
Tasks are tied to process instances
UI and SLA logic driven by Appian’s native task engine
We build our own TASK_GROUP and TASK tables
TASK_GROUP
TASK
Tasks are instantiated based on business rules and metadata
UI, counters, and SLA logic are fully controlled via record types and expressions
If we rely on Appian’s built-in human tasks, what happens if the process instance is deleted or archived? – Can we still access task metadata (status, assignee, timestamps) via process reports or APIs?
What are the trade-offs between using Appian’s native task engine vs a custom task registry? – Especially in terms of auditability, lifecycle control, and cross-process reuse
Is it common practice in enterprise-grade implementations to build a custom task pool for traceability and reporting? – Or do most teams rely on Appian’s built-in task management?
For context: our vendor recommended the database-driven approach, citing limitations in Appian’s native task handling—particularly around long-term traceability, cross-process reuse, and lifecycle control once processes are deleted. That inspired us to explore a fully generic task registry that can support dynamic instantiation and stage-based progression across domains.
We’re aiming for a scalable, future-proof design that supports dynamic task instantiation based on business rules, stage-based progression, and full audit history. I’d love to hear how others have approached this, and what Appian recommends for long-term maintainability.
Thanks in advance!
Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible
Adding few more points from my experience to what other practitioners mentioned.1. Appian tasks are not dynamic (In some cases We need to explicitly handle new functionalities for In flight instances) whereas database tasks are more dynamic.2. If the volume of your requests are huge, then the memory consumption is kind of an issue with Appian tasks(since they are active for long time), but not with database tasks.
The point here is, how to deal with tasks.
A task needs to be completable within max 3 business days. If a user is waiting for external data, allow the user to turn it into a database persisted follow-up with a due date. IMHO this is the perfect combination to combine both worlds, and get the benefits from both.
I do really not understand why everybody seems to try to find an excuse to leave one of the best features in Appian behind and reinvent the wheel. There are valid reasons to go with DB tasks, but as a last resort and not the standard approach.
Its not about ignoring the OOB feature, Its purely depends on the use case. I have used both the approaches and in my current application we are using Appian tasks only. I have seen few pain point with Appian tasks where I felt DB tasks were good fit.
Stefan Helzle said:I do really not understand why everybody seems to try to find an excuse to leave one of the best features in Appian behind and reinvent the wheel. There are valid reasons to go with DB tasks, but as a last resort and not the standard approach.
From my perspective, the only thing that has ever been "easy" about Appian's default task reporting is that it's pretty easy to not do it correctly from the start for the target use case, even as a veteran. Over the years my target users have needed customization to show users their tasks in a way that is organized for work they do, and without a lot of hacks, design acrobatics, and documentation around what the "c5" column means in one context vs another, it's just not easy to do with Appian's current system. However, those customizations are easy to do if the tasks are already in the data fabric.
If the OOB task features were truly low code, I would happily use them more. Simple escalations on straightforward workflows are something I consider to still be low code in Appian, but also haven't encountered compatible escalation policies in many years. Instead, most of the escalations I deal with are data-driven.