This topic applies only to the IBM Business Automation Workflow Advanced configuration.

Developing JSP pages for task and process messages

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The Business Process Choreographer Explorer interface provides default input and output forms for displaying and entering business data. You can use JSP pages to provide customized input and output forms.

About this task

To include user-defined JavaServer Pages (JSP) pages in the web client, you must specify them when you model a human task in IBM® Integration Designer. For example, you can provide JSP pages for a specific task and its input and output messages, and for a specific user role or all user roles. At run time, the user-defined JSP pages are included in the user interface to display output data and collect input data.

The customized forms are not self-contained web pages; they are HTML fragments that Business Process Choreographer Explorer imbeds in an HTML form, for example, fragments for all of the labels and input fields of a message.

When a button is clicked on the page that contains the customized forms, the input is submitted and validated in Business Process Choreographer Explorer. The validation is based on the type of the properties provided and the locale used in the browser. If the input cannot be validated, the same page is shown again and information about the validation errors is provided in the messageValidationErrors request attribute. The information is provided as a map that maps the XML Path Expression (XPath) of the properties that are not valid to the validation exceptions that occurred.

To add customized forms to Business Process Choreographer Explorer, complete the following steps using Integration Designer.

Procedure

  1. Create the customized forms.

    The user-defined JSP pages for the input and output forms used in the web interface need access to the message data. Use Java™ snippets in a JSP or the JSP execution language to access the message data. Data in the forms is available through the request context.

  2. Assign the JSP pages to a task.

    Open the human task in the human task editor. In the client settings, specify the location of the user-defined JSP pages and the role to which the customized form applies, for example, administrator. The client settings for Business Process Choreographer Explorer are stored in the task template. At run time these settings are retrieved with the task template.

  3. Package the user-defined JSP pages in a web archive (WAR file).

    You can either include the WAR file in the enterprise archive with the module that contains the tasks or deploy the WAR file separately. If the JSPs are deployed separately, make the JSPs available on the server where the Business Process Choreographer Explorer or the custom client is deployed.

    If you are using custom JSPs for the process and task messages, you must map the web modules that are used to deploy the JSPs to the same servers that the custom JSF client is mapped to.

Results

The customized forms are rendered in Business Process Choreographer Explorer at run time.