I have a workflow application currently being rolled out. It allows students to request an alternate time for an exam, and once submitted, gets approved by the faculty member (approval task) and then needs additional information from the faculty member (action task) and once that is done, gets passed along to the testing center who gets final approval.
With this current design (I will blame the testing center), the faculty have two steps - first approving or rejecting the request initially and then immediately having to provide additional information (like uploading the exam, setting list of items that can be brought into the exam room, etc) and then marking that complete (a moderately complex page with validations, modal pages to load files, and so on).
The first problem is when the faculty member is looking at Unified Task Report - they see the request and can accept or reject it. We were having a race condition where the new action task would not appear in the report until they manually refreshed the page. Added some dynamic actions to refresh regions which may be helping, and I added success messages calling out the need to now provide additional information. However, this often gets ignored and since they have “approved” it, the faculty feels they are done.
The approach we want to try is combining those two steps info a single step. Which leads me to the question - what is the difference between Approval Tasks and Action Tasks? The only thing I can determine is Approval Tasks have results (Approve/Reject) vs action tasks that are simply completed. What we want to end up with, is a page where the faculty can fill in the exam info and save/approve it, or just reject it.