A task group is a collection of tasks defined in the element <taskgroups>. An individual task group is defined in the child element <taskgroup>. At minimum, each task group definition must include the attributes name and version.

<extension>
    <workflow name="MyWorkflow" context="Project" version="1">
        <taskgroups>
            <taskgroup name="DataSquares" ... headertext="Foo" />
        </taskgroups>
    </workflow>
</extension>

The following figure maps the preceding example to the Workbench interface.

Task group entries support standard ACT attributes. When creating custom task groups with Ansys-installed Mechanical tasks, you can use attributes to specify additional properties.

<extension>
  <workflow name="MyWorkflow" context="Project" version="1">
    <taskgroups>
      <taskgroup name="CustomStructural" caption="Custom Structural Group" icon="custom_structural" category="ACT Workflows" abbreviation="CSTRUCT" version="1">
        ...
        <attributes SolverType="ANSYS" 
                    SystemName="Static Structural (ANSYS)"/>
      </taskgroup>
    </taskgroups>
  </workflow>
</extension>

For the following tasks, you find the solver type by referring to $(AttributeCombination), where the second part of the Physics Type and Solver Name combination is the Solver Type.

For a static structural Ansys-based task, the StructuralStaticANSYS combination shows ANSYS as the solver type. You can obtain more combinations from %AWP_ROOT242%\Addins\Simulation\AnalysisTemplates.xml.

You use the child elements <includetask> and <includeGroup> to specify the one or more tasks or nested task groups to include. In the element <includetask>, you can reference both the custom tasks defined in your extension and Ansys-installed tasks. Setting the optional attribute external to true specifies that the referenced task is defined outside of the extension.

For an Ansys-installed task, the attribute name must be set to the template name for the given Ansys component. Optionally, you can set the attribute caption to use your own display text. For a list of Ansys-installed system with their components and component display names, see Appendix B: Ansys-Installed System Component Template and Display Names. To review examples of task groups referencing custom tasks, see Generic Material Transfer or Generic Mesh Transfer.

If you define a caption, it overrides the task-level caption. Otherwise, the task group-level caption is used.

The basic structure of a task group definition follows.

...
<taskgroups>
	<taskgroup name="" caption="" icon="" category="" abbreviation="" version="1" isparametricgroup="False">
		<includetask name="" external=""/>
	<includeGroup name=""/>
	</taskgroup>
</taskgroups>
...