Hello to all, I have an activity A that is assigned to a group of use

Use tp!owner in custom outputs of activity A and save it in a process variable (user data type) & now() in another custom output and save it in a pv (date and time type). Thereafter you can save data in db and display in activity B

tp!owner is the person who owns the task and completes it.

Aayusha is spot on

I am trying tp!owner but I see the group name that I am assigning to the task. Can it be the case that tp!owner has a different value at the input and output of the task?

basically, no individual has accepted the task - correct?

Once the user accept the task that task owner will the user who accepted it. So what aayusha told should work fine. I have tested this in a simple form and it gave me the exact result.

agree.

@nikolaosm To answer your question much clearly (b in particular),

Is there some way to record in a process variable

a) the user that actually finished the task corresponding to activity A (not the group name that the task was assigned to)?
As already said by others, tp!owner is the attribute that holds the user who has accepted or completed the task. Further I would like to suggest to go through documentation at https://forum.appian.com/suite/help/7.10/Process_and_Report_Data.html and https://forum.appian.com/suite/help/7.10/Process_and_Report_Data.html#Task_Properties in particular.

b) the time the user actually clicked the accept button to start working on the activity?
Actually there isn't a way to capture the task properties (tp!assignees, tp!owner etc) or activity class parameters etc into process variable without completion of the corresponding user input task. So you need to wait until the completion of node in order to save the tp!owner into PV eventhough the tp!owner is populated immediately when the user or user in the group accepts the task(Reference: https://forum.appian.com/suite/help/7.10/Process_and_Report_Data.html#Task_Properties). Perhaps not the best, but the only way to say that the task has been started working on by is to poll the analytics at regular interval and check for existence of tp!owner attribute for the corresponding process and its task. Once if the polling has come back with the desired results, we can start making use of them to update any object(could be PVs in any process or a table in the database).

I want to thank you for your answers.

It appears after all that tp!owner was reporting the correct user even though the assignment from tp!owner to our custom variable was done in the task input. I am not sure I understand how this is done... are the input variables also evaluated when the task exits?

I was having a look at forum.appian.com/.../Process_and_Report_Data.html
Where can I use the Task and Process Metrics?

@nikolaosm
The input variables of a task are used if you want to pass data to your form and use that data in your form to display/manipulation. The value specified in input will be passed to form when the task assigned. Same input you can save into process variable. This value will be stored in process variable once the task is completed.
In short, value will be passed to form when task is assigned, and the saved into will execute once form is submitted.

Coming to task and Process Metrics, those you can use in portal reports.
In case you have Task Report, you can task Metrics in definition and in case of process report, you can use process metrics.

Hope this helps.