topic Re: Custom email selector form property - having issues understanding default data in Alfresco Archive

Custom email selector form property - having issues understanding default data

ericsnyder — Thu, 09 May 2013 22:15:34 GMT

I am developing custom form property that is an email selector using a TwinColSelect. The heart of my issue is that I don't understand how to handle the data for the TwinColSelect. I need to prepopulate the property with some email addresses and then allow users to add their own as well. I will also

Re: Custom email selector form property - having issues understanding default data

ericsnyder — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:40:45 GMT

OK…
Here is what I have learned so far.
In this code fragment:
<java>public Field getPropertyField(FormProperty formProperty)</java> there is a FormProperty object. The form property object has the following information:
<code>id
isReadable
isRequired
isWriteable
name
type
value</code>
If you place a value in "default" it will be passed on to the value property. There is no property (that I can see) that passes some kind of a java collection with the information that you put in "Form Values". In other words, it looks like that gets ignored for custom form properties.

Bottom line on question #1 above: if I want to have default values then I will need to place them into the "Default" as a string and use those in my logic. Possibly a better way to get names and email addresses would be to enter all those that I need as users and query the user database or use the database in some way to store names/email addresses. Another way might be to use Drools.

Question #2 above: It looks like the value of my "emails" field is available at any time in the process definition by using ${emails}. I still have not figured out how to pull this info in a script though.

Re: Custom email selector form property - having issues understanding default data

frederikherema1 — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:04:00 GMT

#1: I presume you have overridden the initFormTypes() method on processEngineConfiguration (or use the setFormTypes(…) method) with a custom implementation of org.activiti.engine.impl.form.FormTypes. If not, create such a class that creates a FormType subclass specifically for your emailCheckList type, passing the "values" that are defined in the XML to the actual Type pojo, so you can access them (see org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.EnumFormPropertyRenderer where the values are extracted):


 public AbstractFormType parseFormPropertyType(FormProperty formProperty) {
    if("emailCheckList".equals(formProperty.getType()) {
       Map<String, String> values = new LinkedHashMap<String, String>();
      for (FormValue formValue: formProperty.getFormValues()) {
        values.put(formValue.getId(), formValue.getName());
      }
      formType = new YourOwnFormType(values);
    } else {
       return super.parseFormPropertyType(…);
   }

#2: You mean a SciptTask? You can use "var mails = execution.getVariable("emails");" (if you're using javascript). The execution-object is exposed as a root-object in all scripting engines you use.