So far, you have learnt to model, implement, and simulate the Oracle BPMN process. During implementation, you have infused Business Rules and have created a Human Task. While creating Human Tasks, you have created user interfaces for the participant/users to interact with your Human Task and to act on them. You have adopted an auto-generation mechanism to generate a user interface for Human Task. You have witnessed the use of human interaction in an earlier chapter (Chapter 5, Human Workflow in BPM Process). Human interaction provides user interfaces to the people to interact with Human Tasks. Oracle BPM 11g sits on top of SOA and leverages the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF). Oracle ADF is a powerful framework that includes rich user interface capabilities. In this chapter, you will learn ways to create UI pages for interacting with Human Tasks.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Creating ADF Task Forms
- Creating a task display form
- Creating task display forms—using individual Drop handlers
- Implementing routers
- Creating a Task Form sequence flow
- Creating a Task Form with ADF business components
- Creating a task display form using Wizard
Oracle ADF sits on top of a standard Java platform—Java EE—and takes advantage of it. Its an end-to-end application development framework and is built on top of model-view-controller architecture.
You have created ADF forms using the auto-generate facility provided for Oracle Human Tasks. This is because Oracle ADF is preintegrated with Oracle BPM 11g for the generation and development of Task Forms. These Task Forms are the user interface used by process participants to start a process or work on a task. One can even go beyond using auto-generation mechanisms and can use the Oracle ADF capabilities and framework to build Oracle BPM 11g Task Forms and applications.
You had created BPM Task Forms earlier. BPM Task Forms are user interfaces that an end user uses to initiate processes and to perform activities in the process. You will find that a BPM Task Form is a form for viewing and editing data. It empowers end users with the power to take actions such as approve, reject, and so on, on the work items. Oracle ADF is pre-integrated with Oracle BPM 11g for the generation and development of Task Forms. There are different ways to generate these Task Forms:
- Auto generate: You can use this mechanism to generate Task Forms. When you use this option, you are presented with a ready-to-deploy Task Form.
- Wizard Driven: This is an option from the
.taskfile. However, it offers more options such as temple and multi-row-column layout. - Task flow based on Human Tasks: In this case, you only get task flow and task data, however the UI page must be created using ADF designer's drag-and-drop form creation capabilities leveraging Human Task data control.
Whatever option you choose, you will get a task data control and a bounded task flow. With the first two options, you get a complete page corresponding to the activity
viewin the task flow. In the last option, a page is not generated, however the Human Task drop handler can be used to create a complete page. - Data Control: Whatever option you use to generate an ADF UI page, an artifact that is always generated is Human Task data control. It follows the naming convention
<user Interface Project name>.<Task Name>. It has a child node namedTasks, which contains some elements that are important to understand, such as:- Payload
- Task Attributes
- System Attributes
- Human Task Drop Handler
When you drag-and-drop task elements on the canvas, there are Human Task-specific drop handlers available, which offer the option of creating task headers, task actions, comments, and so on.
In this chapter, you will learn to create a task display form using Auto generate, Wizard driven, and Task flow based on Human Tasks. You will uncover how to create a bounded task flow, how to work with drop handlers, and how to create a task display form using individual drop handlers. You will also witness how to declaratively route control to activities. You will create Task Form sequences (that is, multiple Task Forms in task flow) and learn to use ADF-BC component and Web Service data control while learning about Entity Objects and View Objects.