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

[Michael Anstis]

Porcelli is writing a VFS for GuvnorNG, it might be worth connecting up to
see if you can reuse it for your storage requirements.

sent on the move

On 25 May 2012 15:50, "Mauricio Salatino" <salaboy at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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