topic Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti in Alfresco Archive

Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

ruospalo — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 05:54:41 GMT

We wanted to know if it's possible to use xforms in the user interface of Activiti Explorer and in other case if it will be integrated in a future version. Thanks.

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

jbarrez — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:44:01 GMT

Nothing currently planned for that; The forms are pluggable in the engine though.

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

smirzai — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:04:22 GMT

Hi
It is not that simple. In our requirement we want to be able to have some other kind of forms, like JSP, Tepestry and probabely xforms.
It seems using some kind of form renderer in org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.FormPropertiesForm.setFormProperties using vaadin CustomLayout, it is possible to generate and show the form.
But the problem is reading the values. It seems there is no easy way to access value of fields in gernerated HTML form using vaadin.
Window. com.vaadin.ui.Windows.executeJavaScript helps to execute some javascript in client but nothing for reading values from client HTML form inputs.

Any idea how can one implement it ?

Thanks
Saeid

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

frederikherema1 — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:56:27 GMT

Why using the HTML generated by Vaadin? Why not just use the API for getting the FormProperties and render it the way you like?

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

smirzai — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:44:34 GMT

Hi
I don't want to rewrite every thing from scratch.
Ideally it would be great if could reuse general features like process list, process creation, inbox and stuff like that from what is already written and just add another form of form rendering.
but as current implementation uses vaadin for all of those stuff, it is not easiy to plug html based form generators like xforms or even forms in JSP.

So what I could do till now is render my form in FormPropertiesForm.setFormProperties function and show the form in a CustomLayout component.
But the problem is how to get the values from form. the only solution that I have found till now is to create a javascript callback function or a servlet in the server side and call the function using client side javascript with vaadin's mainWindow.executeJavaScript function.
This solution is advised by Joonas lehtinen in https://vaadin.com/forum/-/message_boards/view_message/77379.

or maybe I have totally misundrestood ! where shall I get formProperties and render form ?

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

frederikherema1 — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:48:59 GMT

Look how the component that renders the form is used… It gets a list of FormProperties passed somewhere. Trace back where that is called and you'll see how the properties are fethed from the API and passed on to the component rendering the properties.

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

smirzai — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 14:15:44 GMT

Hi
I have done that.
Form properties are read and put in a local variables in org.activiti.explorer.ui.process.ProcessDefinitionDetailPane.initProcessDefinitionInfo function for initial task and org.activiti.explorer.ui.task.TaskDetailPanel.initTaskForm for the next tasks. Something like this:

    processDefinitionStartForm.setFormProperties(startFormData.getFormProperties());

The form rendering happens in org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.FormPropertiesComponent.setFormProperties function. here is the rendering:
public void setFormProperties(List<FormProperty> formProperties) {
    this.formProperties = formProperties;

    form.removeAllProperties();

    // Clear current components in the grid
    if(formProperties != null) {
      for(FormProperty formProperty : formProperties) {
        FormPropertyRenderer renderer = getRenderer(formProperty);

        Field editorComponent = renderer.getPropertyField(formProperty);
        if(editorComponent != null) {
          // Get label for editor component.
          form.addField(formProperty.getId(), editorComponent);
        }
      }
    }

renderer interface provides
Field getPropertyField(FormProperty formProperty)

it returns com.vaadin.ui.Field which is a vaadin component. So rendering is done by creating some vaadin components and add them to the form. The form is dynamically rendered using javascript by GWT.
so html generation could not be done directly.
One workaround could be to generate the form somehow and put it in a CustomLayout vaadin component and send it to client to be rendered in client.

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

frederikherema1 — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:55:43 GMT

There is really nothing I can think of, if you don't want to use vaadin for rendering your forms, but want to use vaading for everything else…

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

smirzai — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 08:17:14 GMT

back to title of the topic, It might be good to use more standard and already implemented way of form rendering like XForms.
The problem is that I cannot find an implementation of Xforms using Vaadin, on the other side there are lots of mature open source products that are able to render Xforms in server using HTML or render it in client using javascript or XSLT . Just an example Http://chiba.sourceforge.net

An XForm implementation in vaadin is what is lacking.

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

ronald_van_kuij — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 16:10:47 GMT

don't use chiba, it is old, not realy maintained anymore etc… use its successor, http://www.betterform.de

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

smirzai — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 09:44:34 GMT

Just to share my experience.
I tried Betterform, but it was not easy to integrate it.
I then tried Orbeon and it went much smoother. I was able to create a pilot very rapidly, though I was not able to integrate it to an already written web shopping application, mostly because of adaptation of css

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

jbarrez — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:17:27 GMT

Would you be willing to write some things down (eg in a blog)?
I'd like to see how that prototype looks like.

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

smirzai — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:29:14 GMT

Hi Joram
Sure, I will do it and will let you know.

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

ronald_van_kuij — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:45:58 GMT

I'm very curious about your integration problems with betterFORM, since it integrated for us fairly easily…

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

jbarrez — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:43:57 GMT

Would also be cool to see a blog post of you, Ronald 😉

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

ronald_van_kuij — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 10:02:10 GMT

🙂

Maybe I will, but just to be sure, we did not integrate XForms with Activiti, we integrated BOTH into our own system where we could leverage the form-key in Activiti to display the correct form. (kind of like a 'minimal' Alfresco ;-))
- We did *not* define the forms embedded in the process definition in any way like you can do with the form properties.
- We do not store the full form results in Activiti, just some extracted values (via xpath). This latter *could* maybe be defined in a form-property way at one time in the future

Ronald

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

smirzai — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:09:15 GMT

Hi
Aha, Maybe that was why it went so smooth with your case.
In our case, we embedded the xform definition inside acitiviti process definition file, so we needed dynamic form generation.

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

ronald_van_kuij — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:30:29 GMT

Well, that would also not be very difficult, one small servletfilter would be enough to use the embedded forms ftom the processdefinition in Activiti. But we do not populate the individual fields in the forms from Activiti. We use full messages, something that fits our (and most known) usecases better 😉

The way we store things is to create a kind of 'business archive' (in subversion) that contains the process definition, forms, other mappings, xslt's etc…

Cheers,

Ronald

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

jbarrez — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 09:07:45 GMT

Ronald: that's the way I expected it to work. Indeed, exactly as it is done in Alfresco too.
But I truly think it is a topic which needs some more blog-love!

Re: Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

smirzai — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:29:54 GMT

Joram, This is my related blog post as promised.
http://saeidmirzaeitech.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/using-activiti-with-xform/

I have explained the structure of my proof of concept application.