Custom ADF UIShell Application with Oracle BPM Workspace Task Flows

An Excerpt from Appendix A (Creating Custom ADF Applications with Oracle Business Process Management Workspace Task Flows) of the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Process Management 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5.0)

Different features available in Process Workspace are exposed as standalone reusable components, called task flows. You can embed task flows in any Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) application. These standalone task flows provide many parameters that enable you to build customized applications.
All the task flows are bundled in an ADF library that you can include in the application in which you are embedding.

Below are the notable steps that I have done to incorporate the BPM Workspace task flows into this custom ADF UI Shell application:

1. I Added the BPM Worklist component in the class path. This library includes the adflibTaskListTaskFlow.jar that contains the reusable taskflows related to the standard worklist application.
2. I want to display the "Process Tracking" and "Standard Dashboards" tabs, so I acquired the oracle.bpm.workspace-adflib.jar from a process portal installation and added it into the libraries and classpath.
3. Modified the weblogic-application.xml to add some soa and bpm related library references. Please see the weblogic-application.xml in the artifacts section below.
4. Added weblogic.xml descriptor that includes a library ref to the "oracle.soa.worklist.webapp" library. Please see artifacts section for the complete weblogic.xml
5. With the jars configures from the steps above, the application is already deploying fine, but I encountered ClassNotFoundExceptions during runtime. I exploded the OracleBPMWorkspace application that ships with the standard Oracle Suite 11g R1 installation and noticed 4 additonal jars as part of the WEB-INF/lib directory, namely: oracle.bpm.security.jar; oracle.bpm.jsfcomponents.jar; oracle.bpm.workspace.adf.jar; oracle.bpm.workspace.model.jar; and oracle.bpm.web-resources.jar. I added them all to the libraries and class path.
6. I configured ADF Security and added resource grants to the corresponding task flows. Ensure to mark check the "Show task flows imported from ADF libraries" checkbox located in the jaz-data.xml Overview tab.
7. Tested the application by deploying it to a soa enabled weblogic server.

User Experience

Figure 1: Workspace Tasks Tab

To display the BPM Applications/ Initiable tasks in the left panel above, you also need to set the "taskFlowMode" parameter of the "taskList-task-flow-definition" to "workspace" and add the taskFlow binding "processApplicationsTaskflow1" on the same page definition. Please the see the complete taskListPageDef.xml page definition on the artifacts section below.

Figure 2: Workspace Process Tracking Tab

The process instances table is displaying, except for ONE BIG FAIL, it does not expose anything, like sort of contextual events- for example, so that the processInstanceDetailTaskflow can sync with the current selection on the processInstancesTaskflow. I hope I'm just wrong but the documentation is empty about this.

Figure 3: Workspace Standard Dashboards Tab

Artifacts

weblogic-application.xml

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
<weblogic-application xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
                      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-application http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-application/1.0/weblogic-application.xsd"
                      xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-application">
  <listener>
    <listener-class>oracle.adf.share.weblogic.listeners.ADFApplicationLifecycleListener</listener-class>
  </listener>
  <listener>
    <listener-class>oracle.mds.lcm.weblogic.WLLifecycleListener</listener-class>
  </listener>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>adf.oracle.domain</library-name>
  </library-ref>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>oracle.soa.bpel</library-name>
  </library-ref>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>oracle.soa.workflow</library-name>
  </library-ref>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>oracle.bpm.runtime</library-name>
  </library-ref>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>oracle.bpm.client</library-name>
  </library-ref>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>oracle.bpm.projectlib</library-name>
  </library-ref>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>oracle.bpm.workspace</library-name>
  </library-ref>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>oracle.bpm.webapp.common</library-name>
  </library-ref>
</weblogic-application>

weblogic.xml

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
<weblogic-web-app xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-web-app">

  <security-role-assignment>
    <role-name>valid-users</role-name>
    <principal-name>users</principal-name>
  </security-role-assignment>
  <session-descriptor>
    <persistent-store-type>replicated_if_clustered</persistent-store-type>
  </session-descriptor>
  <library-ref>
    <library-name>oracle.soa.worklist.webapp</library-name>
    <specification-version>11.1.1</specification-version>
  </library-ref>
</weblogic-web-app>

taskListPageDef.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<pageDefinition xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adfm/uimodel"
                version="11.1.1.60.13" id="taskListPageDef"
                Package="fragments.workspace">
  <parameters/>
  <executables>
    <variableIterator id="variables"/>
    <taskFlow id="taskListtaskflowdefinition1"
              taskFlowId="/WEB-INF/taskList-task-flow-definition.xml#taskList-task-flow-definition"
              activation="deferred"
              xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/controller/binding">
      <parameters>
        <parameter id="taskFlowMode" value="workspace"/>
        <parameter id="showViewsPanel" value="true"/>
        <parameter id="showTaskDetailsPanel" value="true"/>
      </parameters>
    </taskFlow>
    <taskFlow id="processApplicationsTaskflow1"
              taskFlowId="/WEB-INF/processApplicationsTaskflow.xml#processApplicationsTaskflow"
              activation="deferred"
              xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/controller/binding"/>
  </executables>
  <bindings/>
</pageDefinition>

Sample Application

You can download the sample sample application from here.
To test the sample application after deployment, open in browser "http://host:port/myworkspace/faces/main".