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Exposing tasks via Platform API

Answered
Request Demo
  • Edited

The Platform API's Tasks endpoint does not appear to return tasks that have been created as actions within Processes (even though they are called "tasks" and are listed under "Tasks" in the Home area of Workiva). Instead, it appears to only return tasks that are created "ad hoc" within Workiva files.

Can anyone confirm that this is the expected behavior? I cannot find this addressed in any documentation.

Feature request: in the absence of any endpoints to work directly with Processes (which itself would be ideal), it would be helpful to at least have the option to retrieve these "process" tasks via the existing Tasks endpoint. (And as it is, I'm not clear what the use case / rationale is for the API's current behavior of *excluding* these tasks.)

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Comments

7 comments

Date Votes
  • Official comment
    Aaron Robles

    Hi Andrew, that's correct and expected behavior. We purposefully do not include Tasks that are created by or are part of a Process within the Tasks API, as it would open to door for some anti-patterns and sticky situations that could have negative unintended consequences to your Processes and Tasks.

    Instead, in the future one would use fully featured Process APIs to work with Processes and affect their subsequent tasks. 

    The good news is that this Processes API is on our roadmap!

  • Andrew McKenzie

    Thanks for the update and explanation Aaron Robles. Eager to see the Processes API. In the meantime, it might be nice if the Tasks endpoint documentation mentioned this behavior, as it definitely wasn't intuitive.

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  • Aaron Robles

    Andrew McKenzie You're welcome! If you're ok with it I can add you to a list of people to reach out to when the Processes API is in prototype, so you could test things out and give us feedback on those. 

     

    I'll create a ticket for that documentation you linked to be improved and more transparent with the API's limitations and functionality, you've got a great point there.

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  • Andrew McKenzie
    • Edited

    Sounds good Aaron Robles and, yes, we would look forward to trying out the prototype.

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  • Andrew McKenzie

    I want to revive this thread as we've recently discovered that the Platform API /tasks endpoint doesn't return ESG program tasks, either.

    In this case, our goal was to programmatically trigger reminders for selected tasks. If the task ID were available through an ESG Program query, this would have also solved our problem (and perhaps have been preferable), but since it doesn't, we thought we could pick up these tasks via API.

    Once again, there would both ideally be a solution for this, but also the API documentation should reflect this.

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  • Justin Patino

    Aaron Robles, Can you please let us know the status of the Processes API? We are still interested in finding a way to list process info and the tasks created under a process.

     

    Thanks!
    Justin Patino

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  • Aaron Robles

    Hello Justin, we're looking into Processes APIs and tentatively have those on the docket for 2025, thanks for your continued interested, and we're looking forward to testing them out with you!

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