Seam jBPM integration

 

Seam provides two nice additions to JBPM the first one (which this tutorial is about) is a powerful integration between Seam components + JSF and JBPM, the second one is Page Flow Definition : we'll treat this latter in a separate tutorial as it's simply a different way to describe your application flow and what actions and decisions can happen in each place.

How seam integrates with JBPM ?

Seam folds business processes into the Seam container by relying on three key coordinators:

• The business process context: Seam assimilates the stateful context bound to the process instance as one of its own. Business process-scoped context variables are exchanged with the jBPM process context transparently, but are otherwise treated just like any other context variable. They can participate in bijection and be resolved using EL notation. Value expressions can also be used in the process definition descriptor to resolve context variables in the Seam container.

• Declarative business process controls: A set of annotations and page descriptor tags are included that can initiate or resume a process instance, start and end tasks, and bring variables from an active process into scope, all without calling out directly to jBPM. Seam as includes a set of UI controls for selecting the process or task instance on which to operate.

• Identity management: Seam provides a basic component named actor for registering the actor id and group ids that will be passed on to the process instance to record the current participant. The actor component is typically populated during the authentication routine.

Configuring Seam to work with JBPM

Step 1 : Add JBPM libraries

The JAR file jbpm-3.X.X.jar is required for jBPM and it is located under the lib directory of the Seam distribution. We need to place this JAR file at the root of the EAR and then add a reference to the JAR in the application.xml file.
Here's a sample of your application.xml file with JBPM libs in it

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