In Part 1 of this two-part article, you learned the features and architecture of a social-media search application that leverages Bonita, an open source BPM engine. You began to build the application by:

• In Bonita, configuring the TwitterSearchConnector connector, which allows a business process to connect to Twitter.
• Using Bonita to generate a template for the TwitterSearchConnector class, which wraps the connect-to-Twitter functionality.
• Editing the TwitterSearchConnector class manually to let it use Twitter4J — an open source Java library for working with the Twitter API.
• Testing the TwitterSearchConnector class in stand-alone mode.

If you didn't perform all the configuration steps for TwitterSearchConnector in Part 1, you can simply import the TwitterSearchConnector.jar file from this article's source-code download into your Bonita installation. From Bonita's Connectors menu, choose the Import connector option. Browse to the TwitterSearchConnector.jar file and click Open to display TwitterSearchConnector's complete Java code — including the manually edited portion shown in Part 1 — in Bonita's editor.

Here in Part 2, you'll learn about all the activities, forms, and variables that the application uses, and you'll configure the application's business process. You'll attach TwitterSearchConnector to the business process and test the application by running it in Bonita and doing a keyword search for Twitter messages. You'll then enhance the application by configuring it to display the profile of the Twitter user associated with a selected search result, and then to add the profile data to a CRM system.

The search application's business process

This article's source-code download includes a file named SocialMediaSearchApplication_ProcessFormsAndVariables_1.0.proc. It contains all the process definitions, forms, and variables that are required for configuring the search application. (You can refer to "Bonita for business process management" for detailed information on configuring processes, forms, and variables in Bonita.) You just need to import the SocialMediaSearchApplication_ProcessFormsAndVariables_1.0.proc file into your Bonita installation. Click Import from Bonita's main toolbar, then browse to the SocialMediaSearchApplication_ProcessFormsAndVariables_1.0.proc file, as shown in Figure 1:

Click Finish. The search application's process opens in the Bonita editor window's whiteboard, as shown in Figure 2:

You can see in Figure 2 that the process definition contains six boxes, each of which is an activity of the search application. If you click on any activity, its properties appear below the whiteboard in the lower-right window with four tabs: General, Application, Appearance, and Simulation.

The left-most box in Figure 2 is labeled Present the search page. This activity displays a simple search page — the Search Tweets form (Figure 1 in Part 1), where the user enters a search keyword. I have configured one process variable, named searchKeyWord, to hold the search keyword that the user enters. You can see the searchKeyWord variable (among other variables) by clicking anywhere on the whiteboard outside the six activity boxes, then selecting the General tab from the lower-right window, and finally selecting the Data tab, as shown in Figure 3:

The second box from the left in Figure 2 is labeled Search messages on Twitter. In this article's next section, you'll configure TwitterSearchConnector to connect with this activity. TwitterSearchConnector receives the search keyword from the Search Tweets form and sends the keyword to the Twitter web service. A variable named tweetsFound holds the search results returned by TwitterSearchConnector.

The third activity in Figure 2 (Display Twitter messages) displays search results (tweets found) to the user, as shown in Figure 2 in Part 1. As you know from Part 1, in the finished application the user will be able to select any message and click a button to see the profile of the Twitter user who sent it.

The next activity (Fetch profile of Twitter user) uses another Bonita connector that you will configure later in this article (TwitterUserProfileConnector, as shown in Figure 5 in Part 1). TwitterUserProfileConnector connects to Twitter to fetch the profile of the Twitter user. It takes five inputs: the two pairs of security keys you obtained in Part 1 for logging into the Twitter web service, and a variable named twitterUserName, which specifies the name of the Twitter user whose profile is to be fetched. TwitterUserProfileConnector returns seven parameters about the Twitter user: name, location, language, profile image, the user's website URL, number of Twitter followers, and description, each of which you'll map to a process variable.

The fifth activity (Display Twitter user profile) presents the profile of the Twitter user in the User Profile form (Figure 3 in Part 1). The profile contains the seven attributes of the Twitter user. The User Profile form also allows users to click a button to add the Twitter user to SugarCRM as a new account.

The last activity (the right-most box in Figure 2, labeled Add profile to SugarCRM), adds the Twitter user to SugarCRM. To implement this functionality, you will attach a connector called Create Sugar Account (which comes bundled with Bonita) to the Add profile to SugarCRM activity.

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Attaching TwitterSearchConnector to the business process

Now you are ready to configure TwitterSearchConnector to attach to the application's business process. You'll connect it to the Search messages on Twitter activity.

Click on the Search messages on Twitter activity in the process whiteboard to display its properties in the lower-right window. Click on the General tab's Connectors tab, circled in blue in Figure 4:

The Connectors tab shows the connectors associated with the activity. Currently, no connectors are associated. Click the Add button (circled red in Figure 4). The Select a connector dialog opens, showing the list of connectors available for you to configure with the activity.

You can see connectors for many popular applications, such as Jasper and SugarCRM, arranged in categories. You specified the Social category for TwitterSearchConnector when configuring it in Part 1. Expand the Social category and select TwitterSearchConnector, as shown in Figure 5:

Next, you'll perform the following steps to attach TwitterSearchConnector to the Search messages on Twitter activity:

1. Provide descriptive information TwitterSearchConnector's role in the Search messages on Twitter activity.
2. Provide security credentials (the two pairs of keys) to TwitterSearchConnector.
3. Pass the search keyword from the Search Tweets form on to TwitterSearchConnector.
4. Configure the tweetsFound variable to receive search results from TwitterSearchConnector.

Providing descriptive information

Click the Next button on the Select a connector dialog. A Name the connector dialog appears, as shown in Figure 6:

Fill in the following fields in the Name the connector dialog:

• Name: Enter Connection of the search application with Twitter.
• Description: Enter Pass the search keyword to TwitterSearchConnector and fetch Twitter data.
• Select event: In this field, you specify exactly when to invoke TwitterSearchConnector — that is, at either the start or the end of the activity. Keep the default value. (Because you want to associate only one task with the activity, it doesn't matter whether TwitterSearchConnector is invoked at the start or the end.)
• If connector fails: In this field, you specify what the Search messages on Twitter activity should do if TwitterSearchConnector fails. This field allows you to build fail-safe applications in Bonita. Failure-safety is beyond this article's scope, so just keep the field's default value.

The Name the connector dialog should now look like Figure 7:

Click Next. The Twitter Search Connector Input Parameters Page now appears.

Providing security keys to TwitterSearchConnector

As you can see in Figure 8, you to need to enter the two pairs of keys (consumer key, consumer secret, access token, and access token secret) that you obtained in Part 1:

Figure 8 also includes a field labeled SearchKeyword.

This article's source code download contains a file named SecurityKeyValues.txt, in which I have copied the keys that I got from Twitter in Part 1. If you did not obtain your own security keys, you can copy the values from that file into the configuration dialog. Leave the SearchKeyword field blank for now. With the security data entered, the dialog should look like Figure 9:

In Figure 9, the contents of the security-key fields are obfuscated, and the SearchKeyword field remains blank.

Passing the search keyword to TwitterSearchConnector

The search keyword can change every time you run the application, so you can't enter its value directly in the SearchKeyword field. That's why the search keyword is stored in the searchKeyWord variable (see The search application's business process). Select searchKeyWord from the drop-down list to pass this variable as the fifth input to TwitterSearchConnector, as shown in Figure 10:

Configuring the tweetsFound variable to receive the output of TwitterSearchConnector

Click the Next button. A new dialog now asks you to map the outputs of the connector to process variables. There you'll tell the process which variable should store the list of messages that TwitterSearchConnector finds on Twitter for you. Recall from the discussion accompanying Figure 2 that a variable named tweetsFound will hold the tweets that TwitterSearchConnector finds for the user.

TwitterSearchConnector has just one output, named searchResults (as you know from Listing 2 in Part 1). It contains the Twitter messages that TwitterSearchConnector finds. You can see searchResults in the Connector output drop-down list in the left side of Figure 11:

Leave searchResults selected and assign its value to the tweetsFound variable in the Destination variable drop-down list. As a result of this mapping, the contents of the searchResults (messages found on Twitter) will be copied into the tweetsFound process variable.

Click Finish. The TwitterSearchApplication_CompleteWithTwitterSearchConnector _2.0.proc file in the source code download reflects everything you have done so far.

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Displaying messages found on Twitter

You have configured the first two boxes in Figure 2 (Present the search page and Search messages on Twitter). Your next task is to configure the third activity: Display Twitter messages.

The Display Twitter messages activity is just a form in which you use the tweetsFound process variable to display the messages found on Twitter. The source code download includes a file named TwitterSearchApplication_CompleteWithTwitterMessageDisplay_3.0.proc, which contains all the configurations for using the tweetsFound process variable. (You can refer to "Bonita for business process management" for details on designing forms using variables.) Import the TwitterSearchApplication_CompleteWithTwitterMessageDisplay_3.0.proc file into Bonita now.

Running the search application

Now you can try your search application for the first time. Click the Run button in Bonita's main toolbar, as shown in Figure 12:

Wait until the Search Tweets form appears in a browser window, as shown in Figure 13:

Enter a keyword that you want to search for on Twitter and click the Search button. The search application displays messages found on Twitter in its second form, as shown in Figure 14:

The search application works only this far for the moment, because you haven't yet configured the rest of the activities.

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Configuring and attaching TwitterUserProfileConnector

The next task is to configure the fourth activity in Figure 2 (Fetch profile of Twitter user). This activity requires another Twitter connector, named TwitterUserProfileConnector, which is similar to TwitterSearchConnector. Referring to the steps you performed for TwitterSearchConnector, implement and configure TwitterUserProfileConnector:

1. Use the Connector creation wizard to create TwitterUserProfileConnector and provide descriptive information about it.
2. Configure five input parameters: two pairs of keys as security credentials for logging onto the Twitter web service and the twitterUserName process variable, which contains the name of the Twitter user whose profile is to be fetched.
3. Configure seven output parameters: name, location, language, path to profile image, website URL, number of Twitter followers of the user, and description.
4. Map the output parameters to the profileName, profileLocation, profileLanguage, profilePath2Image, profileWebSiteURL, profileNumFollowers, and profileDescription process variables, respectively.
5. Manually edit the source code of the TwitterUserProfileConnector Java class using the Twitter4J library. TwitterUserProfileConnector uses the searchUsers() method of the Twitter class instead of the Twitter.search() method that you manually used in step 4 of Listing 4 in Part 1. The searchUsers() method returns detailed profile information about a Twitter user.
6. Configure TwitterUserProfileConnector to attach to the Fetch profile of Twitter user activity.

I have already demonstrated and discussed the preceding steps in detail for the TwitterSearchConnector, so I won't repeat the whole discussion for TwitterUserProfileConnector. Similarly, I won't demonstrate configuration of the fifth activity (Display Twitter User Profile, which displays the user profile), because it is just a form. The TwitterSearchApplication_CompleteWithProfileConnectorAndDisplay_4.0.proc file in the source code download contains all configurations for the business process's five activities. You can import and run the TwitterSearchApplication_CompleteWithProfileConnectorAndDisplay_4.0.proc file in Bonita to see that all the three forms discussed at the beginning of Part 1 are now fully functional.

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Interfacing SugarCRM with Bonita

Only the last activity of Figure 2 (Add profile to SugarCRM) remains to be configured. In this activity, you'll use a Bonita connector named Create Sugar Account, which talks to SugarCRM through a web service API (just as TwitterSearchConnector talks to Twitter through Twitter's web service API).

The Create Sugar Account connector comes bundled with Bonita and internally handles all communications with SugarCRM. So you just need to attach the Create Sugar Account connector to your Add profile to SugarCRM activity.

Before proceeding, you should have SugarCRM installed either on your machine or somewhere over the network. (see Resources for details on installing SugarCRM). SugarCRM Community Edition version 6.1.6 (Build 5860) was installed on my machine when I developed the search application.

Click on the Add profile to SugarCRM activity to display its properties in the lower-right window. Select the General tab, then select the Connectors tab and click the Add button. The Select a connector dialog (see Figure 5) appears. Expand the SugarCRM category and select the Create Sugar Account connector, as shown in Figure 15:

Click the Next button. A Name the connector dialog (see Figure 6) appears. Enter Twitter to Sugar connection and Create a new SugarCRM account using the Twitter user as values of the Name and Description fields, respectively. Leave the other fields at their default values. The Name the connector dialog should now look like Figure 16:

Click Next. Now Bonita presents the SugarCRM Configuration dialog asking for information about your SugarCRM service, as shown in Figure 17:

You can see from Figure 17 that you need to fill in four fields:

• Sugar SOAP Port: Enter the URL of the SOAP server where SugarCRM is listening. (See Resources to learn more about the SOAP service of SugarCRM.) The SOAP server on my machine was running at http://127.0.0.1:8080/sugarcrm/service/v2/soap.php (the value shown in Figure 17) when I tried the search application with SugarCRM.
• User and Password: Enter the username and password that you use to log on to your SugarCRM installation.
• Application name: Enter Twitter user account as the name of the application connecting to SugarCRM.

Click Next. Next you get a Parameters dialog asking for input parameters, as shown in Figure 18:

You can see from Figure 18 that the Create Sugar Account connector is asking for three parameters — Account name, Phone number, and Website — through drop-down lists to create an account. The Twitter user profile that you got through TwitterUserProfileConnector does not contain the phone number of the Twitter user, so you cannot provide this parameter. I have mapped the other two parameters, which are available, to profileName and profileWebSiteURL process variables, respectively. Select these values from the drop-down lists, as shown in Figure 19:

Click Next. The next dialog asks you to map connector output to a process variable. The search application does nothing with the output of the Create Sugar Account connector, so leave this dialog unchanged and click Finish. Save your application.

Start your SugarCRM server and then run the completed search application, going through all its three forms. Click the Add to CRM button on the User Profile form. You can see that the Twitter user whose profile is displayed on the User Profile form is added to SugarCRM as a new account.

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Conclusion

You have seen how Bonita uses its connector framework to integrate your business process with external applications through web services. You've built your own connectors (TwitterSearchConnector and TwitterUserProfileConnector) and used a connector (Create Sugar Account) that's bundled with Bonita. With the techniques you've learned in this two-part article, you can bring social-networking data into your business process from other popular applications such as Facebook.

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Resources

Learn

• developerWorks BPM zone: IBM business process management provides the tools you need to model, simulate, execute, adapt, monitor, and optimize your business processes.
  
  
• Business Process Management from IBM: BPM software and services from IBM help organizations optimize business performance by discovering, documenting, automating, and continuously improving business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
  
  
• IBM Business Process Management Journal: Learn more about IBM's comprehensive BPM platform.
  
  
• Bonita Open Solution: Visit the Bonita website.
  
  
• SugarCRM documentation: Get installation and application guides for SugarCRM.
  
  
• SugarCRM web services: Learn the Web services and SOAP features of SugarCRM.
  
  
• "Bonita for business process management, Part 1: Configure a simple workflow" (Bilal Siddiqui, developerWorks, October 2010) and "Bonita for business process management, Part 2: Configure forms and variables" (Bilal Siddiqui, developerWorks, November 2010): Read about configuring business processes and designing forms in Bonita.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• IBM BPM in action exercise: Model and run business processes in a visual, code-free environment.
  
  
• Bonita Open Solution: Download Bonita.
  
  
• SugarCRM: Download SugarCRM.
  
  
• Twitter4J: Download Twitter4J.
  
  
• Evaluate IBM products in the way that suits you best: Download a product trial, try a product online, use a product in a cloud environment, or spend a few hours in the SOA Sandbox learning how to implement Service Oriented Architecture efficiently.
  
  

Discuss

• IBM Business Process Manager forum: Join the discussion in the developerWorks community.
  
  
• Get involved in the developerWorks community. Connect with other developerWorks users while exploring the developer-driven blogs, forums, groups, and wikis.
  
  

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Table of contents

• The search application's business process
• Attaching TwitterSearchConnector to the business process
• Displaying messages found on Twitter
• Configuring and attaching TwitterUserProfileConnector
• Interfacing SugarCRM with Bonita
• Conclusion
• Download
• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

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