Enable the business process for portal

A business process is a set of activities (tasks) that can be performed repeatedly to achieve business objectives. The process model is a template from which each process is instantiated. The human tasks that are defined in the process model are called staff activities.

WebSphere Process Choreographer is the runtime for processes that are modeled using the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or BPEL), which is a Web services standard for business process composition. Use the process editor provided by WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition to create business processes for WebSphere Portal. See the documentation included with the process development tools for more information of how to build processes.

Note: WebSphere Portal supports only BPEL-based business processes.

 

Set the Client UI identifier

For WebSphere Portal processes, the process designer must define the Client UI identifier for each activity using the process development tools. This identifier represents an open resource reference which is used at runtime to lookup task page definitions. For a given task, you can select the unique name of the page and the type (static page or dynamic page). To set the Client UI identifier for process activities, follow these steps in WebSphere Studio.

  1. Open the Business Integration Perspective.
  2. Expand the Service Project node within the tree hierarchy displayed (ensure the Service tab is chosen).
  3. Expand the project that contains your business process.
  4. Double click on the process_name.bpel file. The BPEL Editor opens and displays the process model.
  5. Select the staff activity for which you want to define the client UI identifier by clicking on it.
  6. Within the properties window displayed under the process model, click the Client tab.
  7. Select Portal from the Client Definitions list.
  8. Enter the unique name in the UniqueName field. Use the default value "PageDefinition" in the Type field.
  9. Save the changes and regenerate the deploy code.
  10. Export the generated EAR file and deploy it.

 

Database support

Process EARs require the definition of EJB to RDB mappings. By default, only a mapping for Cloudscape is generated. If you want to support other database applications, you have to generate the according mappings. See Mapping enterprise beans to database tables in the Information Center for Application Developer Integration Edition.

 

Security settings

When testing the components of a business process application, J2EE security must be enabled on the test portal server to correctly display the user's personal tasks.

For the input (receive) node and all other staff activities, specify the staff for the different roles available, choosing an appropriate verb and defining a corresponding name/value pair. For example, for a staff activity approveRequest, the Potential Owner role could be defined using the verb Users. Users are specified with their full distinguished name (DN).

 

Exporting classes required by the task processing portlet

During development of the business process, some of the generated classes must be made available to the task processing portlet developer to include in the portlet application.

WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition generates classes for all messages defined in the <processname>.wsdl file as well as for all complex types that are added to the schema. The package names of the messages are appended with an msg suffix. For example, when the target namespace in the WSDL file is set to x.y.z.TravelRequest, the package name for the classes is x.y.z.TravelRequest_msg. The package names for the complex types are build accordingly but do not have the msg suffix. These classes are required by the task processing portlet and should be placed as a JAR in the /WEB-INF/lib of the corresponding portlet application.

To export a JAR file containing these classes, the following steps must be performed:

  1. Right-click the packages to be exported. A context menu is displayed.
  2. Select Export from the context menu.
  3. Select Jar file.
  4. Enter the destination location for the JAR file.
  5. Click Finish.

 

See also

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IBM is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.