Scriptflow how to#

For that we need an integration framework like Spring Integration. The ordering is explicitly spelled out by the various sequenceFlow elements which connect the nodes.Īctiviti is a great way to keep track of business process state, but it’s not a particularly powerful component model or integration technology.

scriptTask - print out a simple confirmational message using Groovy.

serviceTask - invoke the Spring bean called gateway to kick off a bit of processing in Spring Integration (more on this later!).

On inspection, though, you’ll see that most of this isn’t very complicated. The XML artifact, however, is round-trippable: it may be annotated by developers and then revised in the modeling tool. Instead, they’ll use a modeling tool like Alfresco’s Activiti Cloud. Most analysts won’t write this XML by hand. This XML has execution semantics, not just modeling semantics. Here, for example, is a visual model of a very simple business process.Īnd here is the standard XML markup that’s been created to support that model. BPMN 2 is as as close as we’ve come towards achieving that goal. The holy grail of business process management has been to have a modeling notation that could be used by business analysts and application developers. UML supports visually describing processes using activities (steps) and swimlanes (agents involved in satisfying those steps). This last point merits some focus: a good BPM engine like Activiti supports visually modeling business processes.

ease-of-modeling complex business processes.

a BPM engine is designed to handle long running process state, this means your domain model no longer needs to be riddled with process-state specific fields like is_enrolled or reset_password_date.

This is invaluable in regulatory environments.

they support auditing and journaling of important business processes in an organization.

collaborative processes where humans and services are used to drive towards a larger business requirement (imagine loan approval, legal compliance, document revision, etc).

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) offer many advantages, some of which are: It also supports interrogating the business process engine to ask questions about the process instances underway: how many of them are there, which ones are stalled, etc. It describe automatic- and human-based actors in a system.

It keeps track of the progression of work described in a business process. It’s basically a directed graph of nodes (states) that model the states of a complex business process. What is ActivitiĪctiviti is a business process engine. To really appreciate why this is useful goal, we need some background.

Scriptflow how to#

I received an email recently that asked about how to forward control from a wait-state in an Activiti (which is an open-source BPMN2 workflow engine from Alfresco) to a Spring Integration flow and then resume execution of the Activiti workflow process upon completion of some work in Spring Integration.