[jbpm-dev] form builder - requirements request (+work in progress)

[Mauricio Salatino]

Hi guys,
This is a quick update trying to describe the current status of the form
builder project. I've being working the project for a week now and I've
created a branch to do some big changes. I will quickly try to explain what
these changes are and why I think that are important for the project. The
following list shows the project modules that I'm trying to create inside
the form-builder-split branch in:
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/jbpm-form-builder

-Form Builder API (already existing): as the name of the project mention,
it will contain all the APIs to interact with the form builder functionality

-Form Builder Model (new): this new module contains the models that are
being used to represent forms and it was decoupled from the WAR and API
modules in order to allow us depend on the model without being tied to all
the form builder project as a dependency for the one that only wants to
consume and render the forms that were created.

-Form Builder Services (work in progress): I'm still working on this
module, but once again, the services the get the forms and the tasks
associated with a form needs to be decoupled from the Form Builder WAR
module which is the authoring tool. The ones that wants to just render a
form doesn't need to depend on the whole tool.

-Form Builder (WAR) (already existing): This war needs to be clean up in
order to only contain the classes that are used for authoring forms

-Form Builder Consumer/Client (archetype probably/ new): we need to have
clear rules and dependencies to be able to consume a form, no matter the
technology that we want to use for rendering. In theory the consumer will
use the Model and the Services + one exporter to render a form.

-Form Builder Exporters (FTL/GWT): (already existing) the exporter projects
have the mappings between the form meta model and each rendering
technology. I will be focused on GWT and I will try to dig a little bit in
HTML5 to see what can be done. At this point I don't know to much about
these projects and their limitations.

As you can see in the attached image, the services module interacts with an
storage to do different things. One of the things that I will be adding
soon is a service to manage the form builder settings. Until now, all the
services were stateless, they do not store status in no way. What I would
like to add is a way for the user to store their customizations and
configurations in a persistent storage. At this point there are a two
different  things that can be stored:
1) Forms Structures / Form Item Structures / Human Task
Structures-Information
The form builder have a very cool feature to analyze Human Tasks structures
that can be retrieved from a bpmn2 file and based on that generate forms.
Those generated forms needs to be stored somewhere. Because they are
knowledge assets, guvnor looks like the right place to go. I've implemented
also a FileSystem support, to be able to use the FormBuilder without guvnor
which makes our life easier to test the component without having the whole
environment running. All this information is static and stateless in some
way. We store and load these assets from Guvnor or the FileSystem using the
existing services. (Adding support for a DB storage option probably make
sense as well)
2) Settings / Customizations per user or role
I'm planning to add a new service to manage and store settings for the form
builder. These settings can be stored in a database, and I'm not sure that
they can be considered as business assets. These settings are related to
the user that is working with an instance of the form builder and want to
customize its menus and for example choose if he/she wants to store if
he/she was using the FileSystem storage option and a set of custom Form
Items.

As soon as I have the initial version of this service to handle settings I
will be focused in creating a Generic Form Builder Consumer to demonstrate
how you can use and integrate the generated Form with your own application.
Hopefully I can get this working next week.

If you have feedback about this points or if you have some features that
you would like to see working in the form builder in the next month please
write back. I'm eager to see how people wants to use this component.
Remember that I'm working to get this component working in a "standalone"
mode, so if you have another ideas about how to use it outside of the
business process context please let us know :)

Cheers




-- 
 - MyJourney @ http://salaboy.wordpress.com
 - Co-Founder @ http://www.jugargentina.org
 - Co-Founder @ http://www.jbug.com.ar

 - Salatino "Salaboy" Mauricio -
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