7 Replies Latest reply on Oct 11, 2015 3:37 PM by np97190

Embedding the BPMN Designer into a new web application

alefi Nov 25, 2014 9:53 AM

As my computer science bachelor thesis I intend to build a web application in which users can design and share BPMN processes. A later objective would be to allow users to instantiate processes and track their progress in them, but this is strictly an optional target.

I intend to write this as a Rails application and I would like to use the jBPM Designer component as web based BPMN editor. So I though I just use JRuby with TorgueBox to let the Rails application run inside the Java AS.

My first problem now is, that TorgueBox only works on JBoss AS 7 at the moment, while the jBPM installer seems always to install a WildFly AS 8, which is still unsupported by TorgueBox. There doesn't seem to be much info on how to manually deploy jBPM into a pre existing JBoss AS 7 installation.

On the other hand, I have almost no experience with jBPM and I would like to know if my idea is at all a feasable approach. Any information helps, just tell me what you think about it.

1. Re: Embedding the BPMN Designer into a new web application

dosten Nov 25, 2014 3:45 PM (in response to alefi)

Assuming you are using 6.1.0.Final, you can get a AS7 war here.
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2. Re: Embedding the BPMN Designer into a new web application

alefi Nov 26, 2014 10:49 AM (in response to dosten)

I tried to deploy that war file into my TorqueBox server. It didn't work, probably because TorqueBox is providing only enough dependencies to run JRuby and Rails applications. I tried to deploy the war file on a standard JBoss AS 7.1.1 and it didn't work either until I started it with the bin/standalone.sh -c standalone-full.xml configuration. At least that way, the deployment works, but a lot of warnings about missing database tables and stuff like that are thrown around. But as I cannot use a plain JBoss AS 7 it is not worth to investigate much. It seems not to be intended to get a full release of JBoss AS 7 and install TorqueBox into it, the only way to achieve something like this is to use EAP 6 and the so called TorqueBox EAP Overlay installed on top. Sadly, I guess that the license of EAP is not working for my project.

So what I tried now is to install the jBPM Designer as a standalone war into my TorqueBox specific JBoss AS 7 and that works well.

The next problem now is how exactly to embed the editor into my application. I found a video that says something about interacting through an AtomPub API with a component called Guvnor and that jBPM Designer would integrate with that Guvnor thing.

So how do I install Guvnor, integrate it into jBPM Designer and allow my application to talk to Guvnor through the AtomPub API? For all I know this could also be a wrong approach. If you know better, please let me know.
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3. Re: Embedding the BPMN Designer into a new web application

dosten Nov 26, 2014 12:03 PM (in response to alefi)

Unfortunately, I am not familar with TorqueBox. You will get some hibernate errors as the JPA entities are created for the first time.
Take a look at the user guide section on embedding. It might be what you need.
Just curious, why is the EAP LGPL license not kosher with your project?
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4. Re: Embedding the BPMN Designer into a new web application

alefi Nov 26, 2014 1:08 PM (in response to dosten)

Please tell me more about this EAP LGPL. All I found was a proprietary license which is free for "development purpose only".

I'll have a look at that guide.
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5. Re: Embedding the BPMN Designer into a new web application

alefi Nov 27, 2014 6:53 AM (in response to dosten)

It seems that this guide is only for embedding the "workbench". As far as I know, "workbench" is something different than the jBPM Designer BPMN 2 editor. Or am I mistaken here?
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6. Re: Embedding the BPMN Designer into a new web application

alefi Nov 27, 2014 9:11 AM (in response to alefi)
After someone named porcelli on Freenode IRC #guvnor channel pointed out to me that the former component Drools Guvnor is now replaced or fully integrated into KIE Workbench, the guide page about integrating the workbench into external application through an HTML iframe element made far more sense to me. With the jBPM demo deployment, I sucessfully managed to embed a BPMN 2 editor into a static web page.

Here is how I've done it:
<html>

<head>

    <title>Test</title>

</head>

<body>

    <h1>Test</h1>

    <p>Editor frame below:</p>

    <iframe height='800' src='http://localhost:8080/jbpm-console?standalone=&path=git://master@jbpm-playground/HR/src/main/resources/hiring.bpmn2' width='1000'></iframe>

</body>

</html>

I extracted the path parameter from the metadata section inside the KIE workbench interface when viewing a BPMN process.

Although this is a nice start, now I need to be able to create new processes through some kind of API, so that they can then be edited in my frontend application. Also I wonder how access restriction can be implemented when using this iframe embedding. Thanks for any help so far and as before, any info, even if it is only bringing me one step forward, is highly valuable to me.
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7. Re: Embedding the BPMN Designer into a new web application

np97190 Oct 11, 2015 3:37 PM (in response to alefi)

How can we call designer in iframe without passing already created bpmn process path. I want to create a new process witin my web app.
only localhost:8080/jbpm-console?standalone does not render designer.
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