Adding independent forms to the engine

[piseven]

Hi Guys,

i tried out the simple forms and the connection to some user tasks. all worked fine.
but for the project i'm working on i need much more complex forms then the hand-written ones shown in all examples.

here is my use case: i got an form-editor giving an non-technical worker the possibility to create forms by dragging elements to a workspace
these forms are (in this moment) exported to .xhtml
now i want to integrate these xhtml-forms to the usertasks of the engine.
problem is, that they nearly have to look exactly like the xhtml file, including header images and so on.

can anyone explain, how to do this?
i know that there is a chapter in the userguide, but i didn't really understood it =(

cheers

[rkroll]

I'm somewhat new to Activiti as well, so please take this with a grain of salt

I think you have two tracks you can take - bundle the generated xhtml into a deployment or utilize external form rendering.  The deployment route would entail writing the xhtml to disk and then adding it to a deployment archive (business archive or bar), and then deploying the bar to the engine.  Using external form rendering is quite a bit different - you would write code to pull the form key from your BPMN and then use some method to look up that key from your existing solution.  When the user submits the form, it would be your responsibility to submit the data to activiti either via FormService.submitStartFormData(String processDefinitionId, Map<String,String> properties) or FormService.submitTaskFormData(String taskId, Map<String,String> properties).

Hope that helps a bit!