Worksteps and Work Items

Worksteps and workitems have been very confusing to savvion developers. Hope this article helps.
When you create a workstep in Designer – that is a workstep. Depending on the kind of worksteps you could have workitems. Think about Class an Objects. Worksteps are like classes and Workitems are objects. For an adapter, there are no workitems. However, for a human step – there is atleast one workitem. What you call a task is essentially a workitem. When a user completes a task its a workitem that gets completed.
If you assign a task to a single person – there is a one workitems to a workstep.
If you assign to a group of people and specify one of them has to complete it – again one workitem only. However, if you specify ALL people in a group need to complete it there are as many number of worktems as the number of members in that group.
When you assign/reassign, its the workitem that gets assigned. The Workstep remains the same.
Now, a workitem could be assigned or available to you. If its is available (typically in cases when the performer of a task is a group) then when you complete the task, it first gets assigned to you and then gets completed. Events are generated as W_ACTIVATED > I_CREATED > I_AVAILABLE> I_ASSIGNED > I_COMPLETED > W_COMPLETED Hope this helps.