[jboss-user] [jBPM Users] - Re: Creating non technical Actions / WorkItems

[barteljan]

"kukeltje" wrote : 
  | Sorry, but I have no knowledge of how drools workitems are configured/created/used in their 'GPD' 
  | 

No problem ;)
A workItem in drools is in short an extension of their traditional workflow.
They use a simple configuration file to make this extension aware to their GPD ("RuleFlow-Editor") and define some eyecandy-stuff like an icon, which is shown by the editor, a view class which is shown when editing the workItem , possible parameters for the workItem etc.
The workItem itself is represented by a special xml-tag.

A simple process-xml definition would look like that: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
  | <process ....>
  |   <header>....</header>
  |   <nodes>
  |     <start id="1" name="Start"/>
  |     
  |     <end id="2" name="End" />
  |     
  |     <workItem id="3" name="Start">
  |       
  |       <work name="SystemMessage" >
  | 
  |         <parameter name="Message" >
  |           <type name= .... />
  |           <value>DemoProzess mit Datei gestartet </value>
  |         </parameter>
  | 
  |       </work>
  |     
  |    </workItem>
  |   </nodes>
  | 
  |   <connections>
  |     <connection from="3" to="2" />
  |     <connection from="1" to="3" />
  |   </connections>
  | 
  | </process>

This results in a procedure to integrate customized node types which can configured with 
nontechnical domain knowledge into the editor and the definition language in approximatly 30 minutes. 

"kukeltje" wrote : 
  | (Drools 'workflow' is not something that is supported by JBoss), so 
  | 

Yes I suppose it would have been an better solution to define well defined interfaces between drools 
and Jbpm than creating a new Wokrflow-Engine(which is a bit of overburden for the most use cases) ....
But who cares ;-).

"kukeltje" wrote : 
  | You are right in looking at the pvm documentation for extending jPDL 4. 
  | Adding new element types is possible this way but indeed not by 'mapping' them to an existing common node type by using 
  | e.g. an attribute value instead of an element name. Might be an interesting addition though.
  | 

I suppose the easiest way to achieve such a behaviour would be to change an editor in a way to map from user "workItems"
to existing jpdl-components, because it would be downwards compatible and doesn't require a change in the engine itself.

"kukeltje" wrote :    
  | Aamof, the BPMN2 implementation on top of the pvm could use something like this as well. 
  | 

I don't know Aamof. What we need is a stable and extendable engine ....
But having a BPMN2 compatible engine sounds great.
Where can I read about it ?
Is there still a stable version ? 

"kukeltje" wrote :    
  | The editor is a different story. With new (user defined) element names it is harder to extend than the runtime engine, but not completely impossible. 
  | Using attributes would make it a little easier. 
  | 

The editorpart is the most important for our use-case because of our "stupid" process-architects :-P.
Which editor would you prefer (GPD or Signavio), I suppose Signavio would be the "state-of-art" solution, 
but the most important factor should be how easy the implemantation of such a feature is. 

"kukeltje" wrote :    
  | With regard to your 40 days, I think it is very well possible to extend the existing jPDL (maybe even the pvm) 
  | and the GPD to support large parts of this (contributions always welcome, with 'support' from our side in return ;-) ) 
  | If you want to go this way, discussing this in the dev forum is a good thing to do.
  | 

That sounds very good ;), I will post a topic in the developer forum summarizing the task,  but it can last until tomorrow, I need some time for summarizing the task in my head :-P.

CU Jan

P.S. I would hope to invest less than 40 days but that's the max. which I can provide.... 

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