This topic applies only to the IBM Business Process Manager Advanced configuration.

Developing using the web service API

The application programming interface (API) for web service clients defines a number of schemas and provides a set of operations to access Process Designer functionality from an external client application.

Because the web API abstracts the actual technology used in IBM® BPM, you can write external client applications using different technologies such as Microsoft .NET or Java. You can use a number of toolkits depending on the technology you are using, such as the Axis WSDL-to-Java tool, to help you generate classes based on the WSDL description.

The web API provides operations that enable your client applications to:

Query process instances and tasks
Manage process instances
Manage and synchronize tasks
Search business data
Manage external activities

Communication with Process Server using web service operations is asynchronous.

Compatibility considerations

The IBM BPM web API complies with the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 standard for web service interoperability. Complete interoperability and other guarantees for the web API are outlined at the beginning of the WSDL.

In some cases, you can implement versions of web service operations that are different from the version of Process Server. For complete compatibility information, see the WSDL file.

All clients created using the web API must include a ClientInfo header object that identifies the client to Process Server. This header passes time zone and other compatibility information to Process Server, as described in the WSDL.