Okay I may be missing something, so this is an ?is there a better way?? question. I?ve basically completed part of an app that allows users to create their own workflows, all based on JBPM (BTW thanks for a great library, saved me a TON of work). No problem taking the input and using Java objects to create nodes in a workflow, then saving it out.
The problem I keep coming across is how to save application-specific data with the definition of a TaskNode. A user creates a step (a TaskNode) and for editing and security purposes, I need to keep track of who/what/when/where/etc.
I ended up solving this by creating a dummy handler with task information fields and not much else:
public class TaskData implements ActionHandler
{
private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
String action = "";
String username = "";
String email = "";
Date createDate = "";
public void execute(ExecutionContext executionContext)
{
// Not really anything to do here.
}
}
Then for every TaskNode, I create a node-enter event with an action that delegates to this:
// Set up simple placeholder for task data.
Action dataAction = new Action();
Delegation dataDelegation = new Delegation("TaskData");
dataAction.setActionDelegation(dataDelegation);
Event dataEvent = new Event(Event.EVENTTYPE_NODE_ENTER);
dataEvent.addAction(dataAction);
taskNode.addEvent(dataEvent);
Any application data I want to maintain gets inserted as configuration data (example, I do it much more automated in the real app):
dataDelegation.setConfiguration(
?<action>approval</action>? +
?<username>jsmith</username>? +
?<email>jsmith@company.com</email>? +
?<createDate>09/15/2005</createDate>?
);
Pulling it back out for editing the task is a LITTLE painful (the XML string has to be manually parsed back out into its pieces) but it's do-able. Obviously at run time, getting variables in and out of the ProcessInstance is pretty straightforward, but this is for maintaining the
definition.
So?
Is there a better way?
