jBPM and the back button

[liudan2005]

I'm considering using jBPM with Seam as we've got a lot of pageflows and processes to deal with. Had a look at Seam doc and noticed back button won't be supported if jbpm is used.

Is it gonna be easy to enable back button with jbpm? If this is gonna take a lot of effort to implement, I'd rather simply use JSF navigation rules.

[tom.baeyens]

that shouldn't be too hard. you should build a mapping of the view-id's to the jbpm page nodes. and before the jbpm page navigation is activated, the token should be positioned in the node of the view id represented by the request.

i'm not sure, but i believe that the view-ids were the page node names. in that case, the mapping from viewId to pagenode is already available with processDefinition.getNode(viewId);

[gavin.king]

Ah, yes, we should support this.

Actually the name of the node is different to the view-id, since multiple nodes can point to the same page.

What you would need to do is store the node name in the Seam PAGE scope. I'll add this to JIRA.

What is the actual code to reposition the token? (I'm too lazy to check the docs.)

[liudan2005]

I'm still not quite sure how to do it cause I'm not familiar with jBPM yet. It would be great if you can add the sample code to dvd example. From what you've described, we're now gonna adopt jBPM for our project. Thanks for your help.

[tom.baeyens]

gavin,

Token.setNode(Node)

You might need ProcessDefinition.getNode(String name); to look up the node. But better is to put the node itself in the pagescope. All jBPM objects are serializable.

[gavin.king]

Yes, i found it on the plane. I implemented optional backbutton support for pageflows ;)

[gavin.king]

"liudan2005" wrote:
I'm still not quite sure how to do it cause I'm not familiar with jBPM yet. It would be great if you can add the sample code to dvd example. From what you've described, we're now gonna adopt jBPM for our project. Thanks for your help.

When I finish checking this into CVS, all you'll need to do is:

<page view-id="/foo.jsp" backable="true">
 ...
</page>

[kcounsell]

When I finish checking this into CVS, all you'll need to do is:

<page view-id="/foo.jsp" backable="true">
 ...
</page>

Using "backable" might be a little confusing only because we have backing beans floating around in JSF world. Would "revisitable" be more descriptive?

It'll be a useful addition either way -- thanks for implementing this.

[gavin.king]

I don't love the name....

[theute]

I tend to agree with kcounsell. It was my first feeling when seeing "backable".

I would propose "backwardable" it's not a nice name though but it removes the confusion IMO.

[kcounsell]

I'm all for removing ambiguity. "Backwardable" seems clear enough.