Business Process Management with Red Hat Process Automation Manager [Part 2 of 2]

Welcome back! We left off in the last post with our workflow finished, and our project ready to be built and deployed. In this post we will take a look at the embedded process execution server and how to view your process definitions, process instances, tasks, and signals within business central. We will then wrap up with an example of how to interact with your process execution server via the REST API.

In this post we will discuss:

• Build & Deploy Steps

• Execution Server

• Process Definitions & Instance

• Process Execution Server API

First things first, lets build and deploy our project. This part is easy enough; in your project view, click the top right button that says "build." Once successful, click the one next to it titled, you guessed it, "deploy." This will show one or two pop-up windows. The first allows you to enter names for your deployment and configure the server. For this example, we will stick with the defaults. If it is not your first time deploying, the second window will alert you to conflicting repositories. For our purposes, we are just going to choose override.

Now we can view our container by navigating to Menu > Execution Server. You should see something similar to below. There will also be a link provided to view your container in the format: [http://localhost:8080/kie-server/services/rest/server/containers/<ContainerID>]

Next, navigate to Menu > Manage > Process Definitions. Here you should see your business process. To begin the workflow, click the three dots under "actions" and choose "start." For our process, the business center has kindly, if not without a somewhat passive aggressive warning, generated a form for us. Of course in a production use case, we would create this form ourselves within the project. Go ahead and enter some information into your form and lets see our workflow in action.

After hitting submit, you will see Instance Details. Navigate to "diagram", where you can see the workflow has been paused while waiting for the human intervention task.

The user intervention tasks appear in the Task Inbox for each 'actor' you defined within the process. To see user tasks available to you, go to Menu > Track > Task Inbox. Here the user can open, claim or release, start and complete the user task.

That's it! We have successfully sent our form object all the way through our workflow. This should give you an idea of how the pieces come together to complete a business process. Hopefully you're starting to see how these workflows can help you achieve your goals of automation and efficiency.

Before I wrap up, I would like to, as promised, touch on using the process execution server REST API. I want to provide an example of a rest call to the process execution server via Postman that will add an additional process execution container to your embedded server. To start, you need to add an authorized user. To do this, from the command line, navigate to your server bin folder and run ./add-user.sh. When prompted, add a use of type application user. Create any username and password and be sure to add the user to group "kie-server." This is the most important part.

The username and password you created will go into the authorization field in PostMan.

Make sure the header is set to "Content-type: Application/xml"

You will create a PUT call with the url [http://localhost:8080/kie-server/services/rest/server/containers/<New Container Name>] replacing <New Container Name> with any container name you would like. It is important to note that with Red Hat Process Automation Manager you send the request to kie-server. You can no longer send the requests directly to business central. After a successful PUT, navigate back to the page with your container information [http://localhost:8080/kie-server/services/rest/server/containers/] and there you will see the added container.

For more examples of available REST API calls navigate to [http://localhost:8080/kie-server/docs/]

I hope you have found this post useful, if you need additional help remember you can always contact us. We will be more than happy to share our expert advice. We would love to hear from you, what are some examples of ways Red Hat Process Automation Manager can help you and your client's automate? Don't forget to leave your comments below.