Hello All,
Its been a long time since I wrote a blog entry and the rather elaborate pause was due to lots of travelling around. Now I am back and hopefully will blog on latest Oracle FMW techniques that I find interesting or worth sharing.
In this blog, I am going to demonstrate the concept of Flex Fields in Oracle SOA suite 11g. The latest release is 11.1.1.4. Flex Fields are one of the useful features available for a manual/human task activity where the worklistapp user will be able to search for a task available under his 'Tasks' based on a value from the payload. This sounds really interesting because, if the user has huge list of tasks and wants to attend to few tasks on priority (probably based on the PO amount) - Flex Fields comes handy to help.
While defining a human task activity under the SCA composite, add the parameters under the data tab, which has to be made available as flex fields for the user. Define the parameters as simple types (Complex type parameters are not supported as flex fields). We will assign values to these parameters from the payload request in the BPEL process. Under the assignments tab, create a role and assign the task to be handled by the user (eg., weblogic, jcooper) and complete the definition.
Under the BPEL process drag drop the human task activity into the process flow from the SOA constructs panel and map the human task to the activity we defined earlier in the composite. This human task activity will also ask for parameter value definition that we defined as flex field params - Map the variables from payload appropriately to these flex fields.
Now, lets perform the critical piece of assigning the payload variables (that are required as flex fields) to the systemManagedAttributes. This will help in defining the labels for the flex fields in the BPM worklistapp which can be shown to the user for performing a search. Expand the human task activity and in the first assign node, create a copy operation and assign the payload variables to the /task:task/task:systemManagedAttributes/task:textAttribute1. [Important thing to note is Oracle SOA provides set of system attributes in various datatypes such as text, number, date, url etc.. We should be mapping our payload variables to appropriate datatype attributes]. Save and deploy the composite.
We now have to perform a final mapping in the BPM worklistapp in order to define the labels for the flex fields. Login as weblogic user into the BPM worklistapp and click on administration link. Select 'Public Flex Fields' in the left panel and search for the human task for which the flex fields must be defined (Edit Mappings for task link) . This will bring up the map attributes page where we can create labels for the flex fields. These have to be mapped to the systemManagedAttributes [Remember the assign copy operation where we assigned the payload variables to the systemManagedAttributes]. Once done for all flex fields, save and close.
Try creating an instance of the process and when the tasks come into the BPM worklistapp for the user, the user will be able to search the tasks based on the flex field values. Some more sophistication can be achieved by way of advanced search where the labels will appear as search criteria and different logical conditions can be used to perform the search. (For eg. PO Value - greater than - 50000 will show all tasks whose PO value is > 50000).
Its been a long time since I wrote a blog entry and the rather elaborate pause was due to lots of travelling around. Now I am back and hopefully will blog on latest Oracle FMW techniques that I find interesting or worth sharing.
In this blog, I am going to demonstrate the concept of Flex Fields in Oracle SOA suite 11g. The latest release is 11.1.1.4. Flex Fields are one of the useful features available for a manual/human task activity where the worklistapp user will be able to search for a task available under his 'Tasks' based on a value from the payload. This sounds really interesting because, if the user has huge list of tasks and wants to attend to few tasks on priority (probably based on the PO amount) - Flex Fields comes handy to help.
While defining a human task activity under the SCA composite, add the parameters under the data tab, which has to be made available as flex fields for the user. Define the parameters as simple types (Complex type parameters are not supported as flex fields). We will assign values to these parameters from the payload request in the BPEL process. Under the assignments tab, create a role and assign the task to be handled by the user (eg., weblogic, jcooper) and complete the definition.
Under the BPEL process drag drop the human task activity into the process flow from the SOA constructs panel and map the human task to the activity we defined earlier in the composite. This human task activity will also ask for parameter value definition that we defined as flex field params - Map the variables from payload appropriately to these flex fields.
Now, lets perform the critical piece of assigning the payload variables (that are required as flex fields) to the systemManagedAttributes. This will help in defining the labels for the flex fields in the BPM worklistapp which can be shown to the user for performing a search. Expand the human task activity and in the first assign node, create a copy operation and assign the payload variables to the /task:task/task:systemManagedAttributes/task:textAttribute1. [Important thing to note is Oracle SOA provides set of system attributes in various datatypes such as text, number, date, url etc.. We should be mapping our payload variables to appropriate datatype attributes]. Save and deploy the composite.
We now have to perform a final mapping in the BPM worklistapp in order to define the labels for the flex fields. Login as weblogic user into the BPM worklistapp and click on administration link. Select 'Public Flex Fields' in the left panel and search for the human task for which the flex fields must be defined (Edit Mappings for task link) . This will bring up the map attributes page where we can create labels for the flex fields. These have to be mapped to the systemManagedAttributes [Remember the assign copy operation where we assigned the payload variables to the systemManagedAttributes]. Once done for all flex fields, save and close.
Try creating an instance of the process and when the tasks come into the BPM worklistapp for the user, the user will be able to search the tasks based on the flex field values. Some more sophistication can be achieved by way of advanced search where the labels will appear as search criteria and different logical conditions can be used to perform the search. (For eg. PO Value - greater than - 50000 will show all tasks whose PO value is > 50000).
