Business cockpit

The VanillaBP business cockpit is a UI for business people to work with business processes. It is about:

1. Process instances (= workflow)
   1. Search for workflows by business data
   2. View active and retired workflows
2. User tasks
   1. Search for user tasks by business data
   2. List active and retried user tasks
   3. Fulfill user tasks

Like VanillaBP itself was designed to be BPMS-agnostic, also VanillaBP business cockpit is able act as a UI for any BPMS. This also makes it possible to display workflows and user tasks from different systems in one user interface.

To learn how to integrate your business services into the VanillaBP business cockpit check the respective chapter.

Development

The VanillaBP business cockpit is a Java Spring Boot application using React as a web framework.

For local development there are two preconditions:

1. A MongoDB cluster
2. A local NPM registry

The MongoDB and the NPM registry can be started by a prepared configuration using docker-compose:

cd development
docker-compose up -d

All services are configured to NOT start automatically. So, evertime one reboots the computer the services has to be started again:

cd development
docker-compose start

Afterwards one can build and run the business cockpit.

Hint: Building the business cockpit will also establish npm-links between the packages provided by this repository. This helps to ensure using the right version during the build and also supports local development.

MongoDB

For production MongoDb one has to use replica-sets because the VanillaBP business cockpit uses the MongoDb "changestream" feature which not available otherwise.

Since MongoDb exposes its own endpoint one has to add a hostname alias to the local hosts file:

127.0.0.1       business-cockpit-mongo

Hint: The file is /etc/hosts for Linux and C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts for Windows.

To connect using a client one can use these parameters:

• endpoint: business-cockpit-mongo:27017
• replica-set: rs-business-cockpit
• authentication DB: business-cockpit
• username: business-cockpit
• password: business-cockpit

Local NPM registry

As part of the build NPM packages are published which has to be used by BPMS software which wants to integrate to the VanillaBP business cockpit. Additionally, the business cockpit itself uses those packages as dependencies. To make this work for local development as well as for publishing builds one has to use a local NPM registry. For this the tool Verdaccio is used.

To use this registry one has to create a file .npmrc in your home folder:

@vanillabp:registry=http://localhost:4873
//localhost:4873/:_authToken="fake"

Hint: Verdaccio is preconfigured to accept unauthorized attempts of publishing NPM packages. Therefore, as you can see, the content of the authentication token fake is not taken into account - it just has to be filled.

To connect to the registry UI use these parameters:

• URL: http://localhost:4873/
• username: admin
• password: admin

Hint: If you do repeating builds for testing then you have to use the Maven profile unpublish-npm which removes previously published packages from the local registry.

Build and Run the Business Cockpit

The business cockpit is developed by using Java 17 and Spring Boot 3 (reactive). To build the business cockpit Maven is used:

cd vanillabp-business-cockpit
mvn package -P unpublish-npm

(-P unpublish-npm is a Maven profile which forces to unpublish NPM components previously published to Verdaccio. You might need to skip this profile for the very first build since there was no packages published before.)

After the build succeeded the service can be started:

cd business-cockpit
jar -Dspring.profiles.active=local -jar target/business-cockpit-*-runnable.jar

To connect to the business cockpit UI use these parameters:

• URL: http://localhost:8080/
• username: test
• password: test

This should show up an empty business cockpit since no user tasks or workflows were reported yet. To test this before connecting your business service one can use the simulation service.

Simulation Service

This is a service which can be used for local development and testing. I mimics a business service which reports user tasks and workflows to be shown in the business cockpit UI.

To start it use these commands:

cd development/simulator
java --add-opens=java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED -jar target/simulator-*-runnable.jar

Now you can open the test data generator form in your browser. It gives you verify parameters to generate user tasks. For now simply press the Generate button. 10 new user tasks should appear in the VanillaBP business cockpit immediately.

Integrate your Business Services

The simulation service also acts as template for your services. In development/simulator/src/main/webapp you will find samples of user task forms.

to be completed...

Noteworthy & Contributors

VanillaBP was developed by Phactum with the intention of giving back to the community as it has benefited the community in the past.

License

Copyright 2022 Phactum Softwareentwicklung GmbH

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0