Task Management

Tasks are the crucial building block of Frends that allow creating visually easy to understand Processes with minimal programming requirements. As the number of different Tasks grow, including them all at once in every Frends Tenant would make for a cluttered experience.

Instead, Tasks can be imported and removed from each Frends Tenant as needed.

Task Management

Tasks are managed from the Administration > Tasks menu, which provides the list of existing Tasks already imported to your Tenant, as well as options to bring in more.

The default view lists the existing Tasks in your Frends Tenant.

Task updates

If there are any updates to imported Task packages in your Tenant, you will be given the option to update them. Version updates to Tasks often include security updates, bug fixes and sometimes new features, so it's recommended to occassionally check if there's any new updates available for you.

In order to easily see any available updates to Tasks, you can toggle the Show only updatable option on to filter the Task package list.

While performing an update you can also choose to not update any Processes using the Task. This allows keeping any existing Processes as they are, and only update the Tasks in affected Processes by hand if necessary. Any deployed Processes that are in use are not affected either way, updating the Processes with Task update only creates a new version from the Process, instead of performing in-place update.

Search for Task

In order to find more Tasks to import to your Frends Tenant, you can use the Search for Task button to open a search view. Search is performed for all Task packages that are included in the Nuget sources, defined also in the Task management. By default, only official and legacy Tasks from Frends are included, but more can be added to be findable, such as community Tasks and custom sources.

Searching for Tasks is the main method to find and import Tasks to your Frends Tenant. You can also see if a Task has already been imported to your Tenant, and can choose the version of the Task to import.

Importing a Task

Once a Task has been found from search, click on Import next to it to perform import. Before the Task is imported, you can select whether to import the Task for use, or only upload the NuGet package to storage. This option can be used to import a Task package for preloading dependencies that another Task package requires, rather than for actual use.

For most use cases, the importing the Task as is is used, without the option enabled.

Once a Task has been imported, it can be used in Process Editor.

When importing a Task, make note of the targeted .NET version. .NETCoreApp 6.0 means the Task package is created for Processes targeting .NET versions 6 and 8, which is the latest and default. Packages targeting .NET Framework 4.7.1 and .NET Standard 2.0 are legacy Task packages and not available for use on newer versions.

Importing Task as NuGet package

If you have a custom Task created and packaged, or you have a Task you need as separate NuGet package, using Import Task NuGet button in Task management view can be used to perform the import. Similarly to importing a Task package from NuGet sources, same options and notes apply.

While importing these essentially custom Tasks works the same as for official Tasks from NuGet feeds and repositories, updating them will require separate import instead of automated notification of update being available.

NuGet sources

In order to find Tasks using the search, the Task needs to be available in the specified NuGet sources, which are NuGet feed endpoints that contain an updated list of Task packages available from there.

Frends supports public NuGet endpoints of version 2. Private endpoints and version 3 endpoints are currently not supported.