integration with JBoss Rules engine?

[ppine7]

Hello,

I could not find a good answer to this question: is JBPM integrated with JBoss Rules engine?

Different people give different meaning to the word 'integration', so I will explain what kind of functionality I am looking for:

I would like to be able to define a set of rules (in Excel, since JBoss Rules can work with it well). The result of a rule (an action) is an approval chain - which is a list of approvers an object has to go through.
My application will fire off the rules engine to evaluate the rules at run time and give me the resulting approval chain. Users may modify this approval chain , adding/deleting approvers, and eventually my application will pass the final approval chain into the workflow engine as the basis for the process definition. Then, jBPM (or other wf engine) will be responsible for execution of the approval (workflow) process.

Is something like this possible to implement using the JBoss Rules engine + jBPM?

Thanks,
Marina

[anuragpaliwal]

absolutely yes without any doubts.

jBPM provides different action handlers which you can use to do anything you want you do in java. You can call rules or call JMS api or Web services.

I gues in you case, at particuklar decision node you would pass controll to Rules engine to return you approvers chain (which I suppose, would be list of approvers ) and use it in your further processing.

However, defining rules and coding it in excel or DRL is out of scope in jBPM.

[ppine7]

Great, thanks a lot for the answer.
I just want to clarify one thing: so, basically, you are saying that it is possible to modify the workflow process definition at run time, yes?

Indeed, this is exactly what I am looking for - to be able, at any point in the execution of one process instance , to modify the rest of the workflow process instance based on the input from , for example, a rule engine.

A good example of this functionality is an Out-Of-Office rule - at each approval step (process node), before sending a notification for approval to the approver, check whether he is out of office, and if so - replace this approver with a new one and possibly modify the rest of the approval chain as well.

Thanks
Marina

[umquat]

"mpopova" wrote:
Great, thanks a lot for the answer.
I just want to clarify one thing: so, basically, you are saying that it is possible to modify the workflow process definition at run time, yes?

Indeed, this is exactly what I am looking for - to be able, at any point in the execution of one process instance , to modify the rest of the workflow process instance based on the input from , for example, a rule engine.

A good example of this functionality is an Out-Of-Office rule - at each approval step (process node), before sending a notification for approval to the approver, check whether he is out of office, and if so - replace this approver with a new one and possibly modify the rest of the approval chain as well.

Thanks
Marina

I'm learning jBPM but I'm interested in drools as well. This question got me thinking: Why would you want to modify a workflow definition at runtime?

The out-of-office rule seems overkill to me. Why not assign a given task to a group of users, so that anyone could "pick" this task up and execute, instead of going through hoops to check if one given user is in the office or not?

Maybe a better approach would be to define a bigger, more robust workflow?

[kukeltje]

good advice umquat. People should learn to think out of the box while implementing processes