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

[koen.aers@jboss.com]

Hi Mohan,

You are completely right as for what you found about the architecture of the GPD. 
the dom adapters will probably be completely generic in the future; as you may have remarked much of the implementation is mere mapping information.

the editparts and their associated figures are probably the area where still a lot of work is needed to make things really pluggable. I am afraid there is at the moment no easy way to work around this problem. All the creation factories are implemented with switch statements based on instanceof logic. All this will be replaced by a generic factory that will instantiate configurable classes in the future... To plug-in your own representation, you would have to break open these factory classes. A quick patch would be for me to enable extenders of the GPD to add the label and icon information to the extension definition. If you would like this, file a JIRA issue and refer to this thread. I cannot however promise to implement this in the coming days. I think it will take at least a month before this change would make it into the codebase.

you are right also about the extensibility using the  syntax. This is however a limitation of the implementation of the engine. In jBPM 4 it will probably change, but of course this does not help you now. The good news is that you can do something like you want to do with the current extension point:
<element
  |     id="mySpecialMailNode"
  |     name="node"
  |     adapterClass="org.jbpm.gd.jpdl.model.xml.MySpecialMailNodeDomAdapter"
  |     modelClass="org.jbpm.gd.jpdl.model.MySpecialMailNode"/>

I hope this helps you a little bit. However, I need to stress that the GPD and its extension mechanism are moving targets at the moment. The extension points and the API will without doubt still change in the near future. Let's keep this discussion going on so that you stay up to date with the latest changes.

Regards,
Koen


View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4014091#4014091

Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&p=4014091