Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite - Generic Loan Demo with Signal Event

Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite Generic Loan Demo

Japanese translation (日本語訳)

Previously we brought you the Generic Loan demo project, but there was a small problem with the initial process design.

The initial setup was such that the user task Approval was completed and on exit it would signal a separate process 'chunk' (for lack of a better word) that visualized a database audit.

This DB audit was started by a signal event, which is not compliant with the BPMN2 specification as it needs an incoming transition element. It is supposed to reach this point and wait for some external signal to trigger it to take the exit transition.

In progress with signal event

We spent this week redesigning this process, updated the documentation, and bring you the results.

This process now has a parallel gateway that splits out to the signal event that is then waiting for an external trigger. The other path from the parallel gateway takes us onwards to the Approval user task. Once this user task is completed it has a signal set in the on exit portion of the user task node definition.

This signal will be caught by the CC Event (which stands for a customer contact event) which then proceeds to simulate registering a customer contact moment in a marketing database for future usage by the company to target marketing activities to its customers.

Completed and signal event triggered

This new version of the Generic Loan demo has been tagged here:

https://github.com/eschabell/bpms-generic-loan-demo/tree/v1.3

For more details here is a bit of a walk through to get you on your way, starting with the Github hosted project bpms-generic-loan-demo.

Get project

# You will want to clone the project as follows.
#
$ git clone https://github.com/eschabell/bpms-generic-loan-demo.git

With this project still based on the Beta releases, the final documentation has not been added, therefore I provide the walk through in this article instead. This will be replaced with details quickstart documentation in the project you cloned above in the future, including a slide overview of the project architecture.

For now lets look at the directories and files provided.

Project structure

README.md - contains instructions and details to get started.
init.sh - the script to install and configure products and demo.
installs/ - directory to put the products for this demo, see README file there.
projects/ - directory containing the developer demo project for JBDS import.
docs/ - directory containing eventual demo documentation.
support/ - directory with all supporting files and configurations for installing project.

Once you have cloned this to your machine, you can then go to the Customer Portal and download the JBoss BPM Suite 6.0.1 product and JBoss EAP 6.1.1 product.

Install products

# Download & copy to the installs directory. 
# Ensure that this file is executable by running:
#
$ chmod +x installs/jboss-bpms-6.0.1.GA-redhat-4-deployable-eap6.x.zip
$ chmod +x installs/jboss-eap-6.1.1.zip

Running the init script

Now you can execute in the project root directory the provided init.sh (or init.bat) file.

Installation output
You will now note that you have a new directory, target/ that contains the JBoss EAP server, an installation of JBoss BPM Suite, and a pre-configured generic loan demo project which you can start as follows.

Start JBoss BPM Suite

# The will run with this startup, installing a maven repository from
# the JBoss BPM Suite in the directory you start it from. 
#
$ ./target/jboss-eap-6.1/bin/standalone.sh

JBoss BPM Suite login

Once the product is started you can open a browser window to login to Business Central of the JBoss BPM Suite.

http://localhost:8080/business-central

There are a few roles defined and configured for the human task that is part of the generic loan demo.

User roles for demo

• User erics with password bpmsuite, has all roles and admin rights.
• User alan with password bpmsuite, has Loan Officer role.

  

  Select Project Authoring

For ease of initial use, login as the first user with full rights to use all functionality in the product, which will be shown in the screenshots used for the rest of this post.

After login you will see the initial screen with links to various parts and components of the JBoss BPM Suite. It has been pre-loaded with the generic loan demo so no need to use the Authoring -> Administration menu where you would start to either create a new repository and project, or import an existing one from some Git repository.

Project Explorer

We will go straight to the generic loan demo to inspect, build, and deploy our first instance of the process by selecting Project Authoring from the listing on the left of the screen. This will take you to the empty Project Explorer view with the generic loan project pre-selected in the right hand menus. This will then load all the existing project artifacts into the Project Explorer business user browser on the left hand side.

You can explore the various assets at your leisure and we leave that exercise to the reader. Please try to remember, this is an early Beta access version and there are issues to be fixed, see the project README.md for more details on what you can expect to encounter.

Project Editor

Now we want to build and deploy the project, so that we can start our very first instance to run through the demo. To do this we need to open the Tools -> Project Editor which will give you the Project Screen that has a Build & Deploy button at the top right corner.

Hitting that button will give a green bar pop-up that says Build successful if all goes well.

Build & deploy project

Now you can open the Process Management -> Process Definitions at the top to get to view your deployed project. You will see a single entry for the LoanApp and you can inspect it by clicking on the search spy-glass icon on the right, which provides process details.

The button New Instance at the top can be pressed to deploy a new process, which pops-up with your first form to submit a loan application.

Process started

The following data can be filled in to initiate the process.

Submit form

• Name: erics
• Age: 30
• Income: 3000
• Amount: 10010  (auto approval if under 10k, no human task)
• Period (in months): 24

Hit the submit arrow at the bottom of the form and then you can then inspect the process progress, view the task list, and complete tasks as needed.

Monitoring (BAM)
For monitoring you can view the Process & Task Dashboard, especially as you claim and complete tasks from the Tasks List.

Monitoring dashboard (BAM), 1 completed

This completes the quick overview, which gets you started on working with the JBoss BPM Suite product.

One final note, the entire demo is running in memory, so if you restart your JBoss BPM Suite, you will lose your process data, instances, etc. Just re-run the jar tooling discussed above to reset your installation.

Japanese translation (日本語訳)