PLAYING AT WORK

March 10, 2018 Leave a comment

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Sometimes work can also be play – and guess what, that’s good for the worker and for the work. Read this new article about how work and play intersect in the research conducted by the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) group’s emerging technologies team, the AppsLab. For more from the AppsLab and what they’re researching, visit their blog. Two recent series of posts were on the developer experience and fun with Facebook.

CONFERENCE SEASON
The OAUX team’s on-site lab had a busy April, traveling the country and welcoming more than 100 Oracle customers and partners at various conferences to a series of one-on-one usability feedback sessions, focus groups on FinTech, collaborative design jams on mobile cloud analytics, and more. Read more about where we’ve been on the OAUX blog in our latest post. We’ve also built photo albums from our recent trips in the last month. Visit the OAUX team’s Facebook page to see us in action and follow us on Twitter.

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Oracle BAM 12c Security by Dan Atwood

March 9, 2018 Leave a comment

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Oracle Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) 12c comes with Oracle SOA Suite and BPM, and it is a very powerful tool that should be used on most projects.  Organizations are using it successfully today to graphically visualize trends in their data to make operational decisions and to send alerts before issues occur.

One of the difficulties organizations initially have after installing Oracle BAM 12c is determining how to define the security levels and permissions for its different types of users.  Oracle BAM has both coarse grained security defined at the application role level down to very fine grained security defined at individual BAM artifact and data object row levels.
BAM Coarse Grained Security – BAM Application Roles
For many organizations today, different parts of the organization will each access and share the same BAM domain. For some, the coarse grained predefined BAM security groups and roles assignments will suffice. When left to the default coarse grained security, these three types of BAM users will exist:

  1. BAM Administrators in an organization are able to access and edit any data object, EMS, or projects that other teams have created
  2. BAM Designers in an organization can access and edit any BAM project and their queries, views, dashboards and alerts that other teams have created
  3. BAM End Users in an organization can view any dashboard as long as they know the URL for the dashboard. Read the complete article here.

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BAM Alerts by Marcel van de Glind

March 8, 2018 Leave a comment

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This post (next in the BAM series) is about BAM Alerts. Alerts were not part of the POC, but in the blog series I also wanted to pay attention to it, resulting in this post. I have made a very small example to get some feeling in there and will not get into all the details of alerts.

As usual, first a piece of theory from the Oracle documentation:

An alert performs one or more actions when launched by an event and filtered by one or more conditions. An event can be an amount of time, a specific time, a date and time, a repeating event between two dates, a change in a data object, output from a continuous query, or a manual event. A condition restricts the alert to an event occurring between two times or dates or to a specific day of the week. An action can send a notification, perform a data object operation, invoke a web service, call an external method, or launch other alerts. Read the complete article here

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Part 1 – Oracle BPM 12c Process Invoke Database by Dan Atwood

March 7, 2018 Leave a comment

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Part 1 – Create a WebLogic JNDI Database Connection

This explains how the WebLogic JNDI connection to a database schema is created.  In the next two posts, you will see how the Database Adapter can use this connection once it has been created.  This simply describes the steps that are necessary to configure the JNDI connection initially. 

Components exposed in a SOA application can be exposed as a service, and a call to the database is no exception.  In order to invoke the database from a BPM process, it first has to be exposed as a service.

First, a datasource needs to be created.  You need the database schema’s datasource configured to create the JNDI connection information needed to access it. If all you want to do is to access the data from ADF, this is all you would need. 

Where the database adapter comes into play, however, is when your project’s composite needs to access it as a service (e.g., when a composite’s Mediator needs to connect to the database adapter). In the fourth part of this series, the Database Adapter SOA component will be dragged into the External References column of your composite diagram. For this to succeed at runtime, the datasource’s JNDI connection to the datasource has to first be added to the database adapter’s DBAdapter deployment.  This will be done in part 3 of this series.

This example uses the HR schema that comes that is preinstalled with the Oracle XE 11g or 12c SE database, but these same steps could be used to expose other database schemas. 

1. Open the WebLogic Console (e.g., http://localhost:7001/console), and log in.

2. In this step, the source of the data is configured as a datasource to the SOA infrastructure.  This datasource provides the connection to the actual underlying data provider.  Configure the JDBC Datasource in the WebLogic by selecting Services -> Data Sources. Read the complete article here.

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PaaS Partner YouTube Update March 2018

March 6, 2018 Leave a comment


The March edition of the PaaS & Middleware Partner Update contains four topics:

• Free on-demand trainings

• Oracle Developer Meetups

• Oracle OpenWorld Call for Papers

• PaaS Community Webcast Oracle JET

For regular updates please subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Thanks for your likes and sharing the video on YouTube and LinkedIn. For the latest SOA & BPM Partner Community information please visit our Community update wiki here (Community membership required).

PaaS Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Technorati Tags: YouTube,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Jürgen Kress,Middleware Update,Partner Update

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Dealing with Dates and Times in Oracle Process Cloud Service by Sebastien Wiertz

March 5, 2018 Leave a comment

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Introduction

Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS) is great! You can build process-based applications in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, much quicker than most Low Code platforms in the market. Of course, you can’t, or at least shouldn’t, develop any “normal” master-detail CRUD application with Oracle Process Cloud Service. If you need this kind of applications perhaps Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service will suit you better, but for process-centric applications, it’s a hard to beat tool.

As you may know, Oracle also has an on-premise product, called Oracle BPM, which features a similar codebase, but it features a more advanced and complex UI and it takes a bit more time to produce a similar application.

Oracle PCS really shines for its simplicity and ease of use, because the UI was streamlined and is much more focused. However, all this optimization and streamlining led to decisions to simplify the UI and some features present in Oracle BPM are not present in Oracle PCS. Most of them we won’t really need except for 1% of all our application needs, but a few are a more common necessity. The capacity to use functions to manage and operate dates and times fit this last set.

Oracle BPM allows you to manipulate dates using several options, with Data Associations and Script tasks perhaps being the most common. In Oracle PCS, the Data Associations don’t allow you manipulate dates nor retrieve the current Date / Time, and script tasks plain and simply are not available.

It’s possible to create services that do whatever we need to do with dates and then call them in Oracle PCS, but sometimes we want a more direct approach.

The Use Case

Let’s consider the following case:

We have a simple approval process with 3 steps. Every time there’s a response to a task, we want to record which response was and at which date and time it was made. We also want to show this information to the user, in the task web form, and we want that the whole process takes a calculated amount of time as the most, with it automatically finishing up after that amount.

Something a bit like this: Read the complete article here.

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Web Forms in Oracle Process Cloud Service by Antonis Antoniou

March 4, 2018 Leave a comment

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The September 2016 release introduced an entirely new web forms functionality called “Web Forms”, an alternative to its existing Frevvo web forms with the latter being renamed to “Basic Forms”. The new “Web Forms” functionality is more business user-friendly, promoting important development principles like multiple views, re-use, branding, list of values and fetching data using REST connections.

The new “Web Forms” group its functionality into three areas; the left area which includes the “Properties” section and the “Data” section, the right area that includes the palettes (basic, advanced, forms and business types) and the main area which is the drawing canvas.

Using drag and drop gestures you can design your form using any components from all four palettes. The “Basic Palette” includes basic components like the input text, button, checklist, radio button, date, etc. while the “Advanced Palette” includes components like image, video, section, tab, table, etc.

You can also use the “Forms Palette” to re-use previously created forms or you can use the “Business Type Palette” to create a user interface using a “data-first” approach (Oracle Process Cloud Service will automatically create a form using the data definitions of the business type). Read the complete article here.

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Implementing Case Management Patterns using Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS) by Jose Rodrigues

March 3, 2018 Leave a comment

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Hi everyone and welcome to the second part of our article on implementing Case Management (CM) patterns with Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS).

On the first part, we learned a bit about the concepts around Case Management and we (barely) started a process on PCS. We’ll use this process now as a container to implement the ad-hoc nature patterns.

The First Rule of Fight Club

“We do NOT try to implement Case Management on PCS!” – That’s the first rule. What we will do is implement a small subset of behaviors, which will offer some of the advantages of Case Management.

The second rule is that we have two buddies that can help us in this quest: Database Cloud Service (DBCS) and Integration Cloud Service (ICS). Some of the behaviors will need a bit of persistence, which implies placing a lot of case metadata in some control tables, hence the DBCS, with the ICS being used to handle all integrations. ICS may not be necessary but makes integration easy as peach. Use them extensively!

As we’re trying to “hammer a screw”, things will not be pretty. This is a workaround. Please take it as a way to implement these behaviors.

Regarding the first rule, the set of behaviors which we’re going to implement is the following:

  • Ad-hoc Task and Process Invocation
  • Milestone and Stage Trigger/Set
  • Event Listeners

Let’s Start

So, last time we created a message based process

Again, the process must be created with messages events, as these will allow it to be called by other cases in an asynchronous way.

The first thing we do is get a case ID. This ID should come from another system (for instance, a database) and will be used to guarantee correlation between all elements of the case. We’ll get into to that further ahead.

Then, what we typically do is set up a business rule (decision table) or a database table, in which we predefine some configurations, such as Overall Process SLA, Milestone SLA’s, etc… This will allow you to change the way a process/case behaves, without actually having to change the process model. Read the complete article here.

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Forceview Takes Business Ideas to Automation in Minutes

March 2, 2018 Leave a comment

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Patrick ten Broeke, Forceview’s Creative Analysis Officer, shares how Oracle Process Cloud powers agile engagement with business experts to cut time to value from months to minutes. Watch the video here.

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The Curious Case of Missing Port Type in Oracle PCS by Arun Pareek

March 1, 2018 Leave a comment

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I was recently working on a simple process in PCS for a license approval flow. Given the purists that I am, I began by defining definitions for the various message based activities used in the process flow. The process was an asynchronous process with a few intermediate events. A simplified snippet is shown here for visualization.

In order to implement the above process, I created a service definition (WSDL) with the following schematic. As you can notice, there is a portType for accepting requests into the process (fc.myst.bp.TestDrive) and a callback portType for sending messages out of the process (fc.myst.bp.TestDrive.CallBack). Each of the portTypes have operations for catch and throw messages respectively.

Creating a service definition is considered a best practice as it will not lead to multiple definitions created by the process when generating interfaces from message based implementations. So instead of using “Define Interface” we tend to use “Use Interface“. Read the complete article here

 

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