[jboss-dev-forums] [Design of JBoss jBPM] - Re: GPD New Generation Extensibility

[mohankishore]

Thanks for the reply Koen. 

Like I said, even a few one liners would probably go a long way in helping me. From what I have been able to figure out, we have the following structure:

- the plugin.xml defines two kinds of objects:
  a) "core" objects - model or semantic elements
  b) "ui" objects - also known as notation elements

- the model elements are associated with DomAdapters that serialize/deserialize the model into XML.

- the ui elements have corresponding EditParts to render them in the graphical editor or the tree view. The problem here is that the label/icon mapping is currently hard-coded in the code.

- we already have the ability to use a model element and plug it into the palette using an extension point. But am running into a fundamental problem with the XML schema itself...

The jBPM schema has elements like <fork ..> and <join ..>, whereas I think it might be more extensible if it were <node type="fork" ..> etc. Right now when my custom node gets added to the ProcessDefinitionDomAdapter, it automatically creates an XML element with the same name as the "id" of my model object in the plugin.xml.

Do you have any comments on this disconnect and the best way to solve it?

To repeat my underlying requirement: suppose I have an EmailActionHandler that I anticipate being used multiple times within a single workflow. I do not want my users to keep browsing and finding the action mapping. I want to provide a custom icon on the palette, which when placed in the flow will translate to a node with a pre-associated action-handler. (Am currently doing the pre-association by extending the Node class to create my own model object, which associates the action-handler in its constructor).

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