Creating our own front end for end users (Metastorm BPM)

Heathesh Bhandari

Hi there,

We would like to create our own front end for Metastorm BPM and not use the web interface at all.

Does the ECL currently have enough functionality to accomplish this?

Is there any specific approach you would recommend to doing this?

Thanks,

Heathesh

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Comments

Todd_Greve

Heathesh,

You have a number of different options for customization to accomplish what you would like to do. At the simplest level you could expose your BPM processes with some configuration through SharePoint so you can see your Blank Forms, ToDo List etc in lists within SharePoint. These web parts will still open the BPM forms hosted through the BPM Web Client by default although you could link them to something else if you are really against the forms.

The BPM Web Client actually uses the ECL.NET interface (part of the SDK) to do all the work it needs to when interacting with the BPM Engine, so you certainly can use the SDK to create a completely customized interface. The BPM SDK (available through the Customer Zone) ships with documentation and example programs using the different components of the SDK (ECL for .NET, WCF Web Services and Java) so these should give you a good place to start.

The form aspects are all there, but there is very little in the example programs to help you with rendering the forms so these can be a little more challenging. What you can do is use the URL to open a Folder in your program if you are not opposed to using the BPM Forms as rendered through the Web Client. This could be a good starting point or even ending point.

I believe that some of the new form elements in 9.1 may not be fully documented or exposed through all of the API's in the SDK, but that should be rectified soon.

I have heard that the suggestion is to use the ECL.WS at this point due to potential eventual plans to retire the .NET ECL, so keep that in mind as well.

If you want assistance hooking this all into your application then feel free to contact the Professional Services group with Metastorm/OpenText and they could coordinate a resource to work with you.

I hope that helps

Have a great weekend

Todd

Jaspal Hayre

We are trying to build our own front end as well and opted to go for the Java ECL but found a couple of issues. The guy working on this is on hols at moment but i'll see if he can post his findings when he is back!

Michael_Turek

Funny, we are thinking about doing the opposite.

We are still on 7.6, only use the ECL..

I personally think the ECL is great if you have the resources to support and maintain the UI (ASP.NET, C# ).

Our approach (not sure if I would recommend it) for process form design was:

Build form in ASP.NET

Build Metastorm form with only Memo field

Use Memo field to store serialized data

Use ECL to submit serialized data to the Memo field (as part of action)

The ToDo Watch list was fairly straight forward using the ECL.

The reasoning behind us building forms this way was to not have to build 2 forms (1 metastorm, 1 ASP) for each form. It just seemed overkill for us, but in doing so we needed to worry about our own attachments, session timeouts, individual field access per stage, etc.

Unless you really need a killer UI, I'd think hard about going in this direction.

Also, there are limitations to storing a large string in a Memo field. When the string gets extremely large, the ECL can choke on it causing a Unable to save server data. But you will not receive this error if using the Metastorm client.

Todd_Greve

Whenever considering this type of approach Winston I usually look at having MBPM provide the routing of the process, but letting the form manage the majority of the data directly against a back end data source or brokered through something like NHibernate, and not pass that through MBPM. The only data that would go into MBPM would be those that impact the routing or are required for integration and expose fields on the forms to return data collected or calculated by the process (results from back end integrations for example).

You are certainly able to, if by implementing a little plumbing, add the fields to the BPM form and get a certain amount of the fields rendering automatically for you on your custom forms and then customize the others fields all depending what you are attempting to accomplish.

Either way, as you say you start having to do a lot more yourself resulting in more time for each new process you create.

Thanks for your input

Todd