A typical requirement in business processes is to have a human agent make decisions that have simple answers. An example of such a decision is to approve or reject a case or to supply some simple information such as the age of the claimant. Using manual activities to solicit such information would require that a different user interface screen for each question be available in the application. This is cumbersome and since process definitions can change over time, such user interface screens would be some what temporary.
The Decision activity is a specialization of a Manual activity that drives a metadata driven user interface for asking simple questions. The questions and possible answers are in the activity metadata thus allowing a single user interface to be used for a wide range of questions. Two types of questions are currently supported. These are multiple choice type questions and questions requiring an answer that can be supplied in one field on the user interface.