[jbpm-dev] document based workflows

[Kris Verlaenen]

Interesting use case.  I do agree that some basic support for more 
document management like this could definitely be useful to a lot of 
people.  These two features you are mentioning, do you see them as 
additional node types that you can use in your process if you want to?  
Or would this require deeper integration?  I think this is a good 
example of what is called "domain-specific processes" in the request for 
comments (under usability), where the application domain happens to be 
document management.

Ideally, I believe most of the features related to document management 
should be achieved by providing the necessary integration with a 
document management system of some kind, not trying to build similar 
functionality closely tied to the process engine itself (like templates, 
document management, etc.).

Kris


> 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-803.pdf>
> http://www.plaanibal.com/c/document_library/get_file?p_l_id=11763&folderId=17101&name=DLFE-804.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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