Exposing heritage human services
In addition to implementing the activities in a business process definition (BPD), the heritage human services that you create in IBM® Process Designer can also be used to customize the Process Admin Console or to create a custom dashboard for IBM Process Portal. The exposure settings for a service depend on its intended purpose.
Before you begin
To perform this task, you must be in the IBM Process Designer desktop editor.
For information about exposing client-side human services, see Exposing client-side human services.Procedure
Results
In addition to being exposed to user interfaces as described in the previous table, all exposed heritage human services are made available to be called as URLs.
The URL is composed of the
name of the host on which IBM Process
Center Server
or Process Server is
installed, the port that is designated for the server during the IBM Business Process Manager installation,
and the acronym for the process application that contains the service.
For example, if you expose a service named MyService, you can access
it from the following URL:
http://host_name:port/contextRootPrefix/executeServiceByName?processApp=acronym&serviceName=MyService
The
default value for the contextRootPrefix is teamworks.
For more information about how to configure a custom context root,
see the section for the -update parameter in
the BPMConfig command-line utility topic.Remember: Any browser-specific URL limitations, such as the
URL length and character restrictions, apply and must be considered
when calling a heritage human service as a URL.
- URL parameters
- The URL can contain one or more of the following parameters:
- processApp
- The name of the process application
- serviceName
- The name of the heritage human service
- snapshot
- The name of the snapshot
- com.lombardisoftware.errorPage
- The URL of the error page
- Input variables
- In the URL, input variables that are defined for the service have
the following format:
&tw.local.variableName=value
The default configuration is defined in the 99Local.xml file. For more information, see The 99Local.xml and 100Custom.xml configuration files. Also, the following example shows how to customize the 100Custom.xml file to enable the type-string-to-date configuration option:<common merge="mergeChildren"> <type-string-to-date merge="replace">true</type-string-to-date> </common>
For heritage human services, variableName can be a system-defined SimpleType or a BusinessObject that is based off a SimpleType variable (of type String, Integer, Decimal, Date, Time, Selection). Date or Time are allowed only after enabling the type-string-to-date configuration option.Restriction: The type-string-to-date configuration option is applicable only to heritage human services. It does not apply to client-side human services.The default configuration is defined in the 99Local.xml file. For more information, see The 99Local.xml and 100Custom.xml configuration files. Also, the following example shows how to customize the 100Custom.xml file to enable the type-string-to-date configuration option:<common merge="mergeChildren"> <type-string-to-date merge="replace">true</type-string-to-date> </common>
- Date/Time syntax
- The date and time format differs between client-side human services and heritage human services. The syntax for the other simple types (String, Integer, Decimal, Selection) is the same for client-side human services and heritage human services.
- Note: For information about the date and time syntax in human services, see Exposing client-side human services.
- For heritage human services, the date and time format is as follows:
- The Date format is YYYY-MM-DD.
- The Time format is HH:mm:ss.
- Time Zone: Because support for time zone information is not provided with heritage human services, the default time zone is set to the time zone of the server.
- Service version invoked
- If a specific snapshot name is not passed to the URL, the default
version of the service that is run depends on the environment in which
the service is running.
Table 2. Version of the heritage human service invoked for each environment Environment Version of the heritage human service Process Center The exposed service in the tip of the default track is run. Process Server The exposed service in the default snapshot is run. Process Portal When you start a heritage human service as a dashboard in Process Portal, the version that is started is the current working version of the heritage human service if the version is exposed. Otherwise, if there is an active snapshot in which the heritage human service is exposed, then the snapshot version is started. If the current working version is not exposed and there are multiple active snapshots in which the heritage human service is exposed, then the latest snapshot version is started. A portlet in an external portal server You can export only one valid snapshot when you generate a portlet for a dashboard. When the portlet communicates back to IBM Business Process Manager, that snapshot must be active.