[jbpm-dev] document based workflows

[Pau Carré Cardona]

Hello,
I have seen the architecture model of jBPM 5 and it seems very complete.
Anyway, I don't understand why you do not finish the jBPM 4 designer before
developing the jBPM 5 version.
The request I have is based on the introduction of information in the BPM
system. Forms are a good way to map BPM variables, specially if those forms
have validation and  are dynamic. This forms are specially well suited when
interacting with external individuals (such as citizens in a government
administration).
But forms are not suited for internal workflow in document based BPM. Lets
say that, for internal work, a user should send a document and wants the
information of this document be processed by the BPM engine for validation,
routing or whatever. In this case the BPM engine should have two features:
1.- Allow to open a document template, allow to edit it and send it to the
destination of the task.
2.- Map some parts of the text into workflow variables for internal
processing.

The first feature seems to be trivial but the BPM engine should have some
kind of template linked to the task so the user only have to modify certain
parts. For this purpose the BPM should have an HTML rich editor that can
read templates from the workflow definition.
The second feature can be easily done using custom TAGs. For example, one
can write the TAG $<destination_name> in the document wherever the document
should have the name of the destination user. Then, the user could write the
value of the TAG $<destination_name> or optionally this value could be
computed by the BPM engine. This way it is trivial to map the text content
to variables.

The Balearic Islands Government have developed a jBPM 3 opensource project
that allows users to edit documents with Open Office using templates stored
in the tasks. Then users can edit them and FreeMarker parses the ODF
document extracting the values of the variables. I think it is a good
starting point to evaluate document-based workflows.

Here you have a presentation of the project:
http://www.plaanibal.com/c/document_library/get_file?p_l_id=11763&folderId=17101&name=DLFE-803.pdf
http://www.plaanibal.com/c/document_library/get_file?p_l_id=11763&folderId=17101&name=DLFE-804.pdf

The text is in Catalan but slides are self-explaniatiory.

Pau Carré Cardona
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