Eclipse setup for Activiti Explorer

[rajan]

Can someone pass on the correct way of creating  Activiti Explorer Project in Eclipse and Make a change to it and then create a WAR file, which will be deployed in to a container like Tomcat.

If some one can pass on this knowledge will be useful to a quick bootstrap for a newbie like me.

Regards
Rajan

[rajan]

Update to this Post. I was able to bring up activity explorer in Eclipse using Activiti-explorer war.

Thanks

[jbarrez]

Clone the code at https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti

Import all with maven. The code for explorer is in the activiti-explorer module. This builds the jar, which is included in activiti-webapp-explorer2.

[gregdavisfromnj]

I took a different approach, as my goal was to simply modify the application context and properties files before deploying.  This approach uses Maven WAR packaging overlays (http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-war-plugin/overlays.html).

First, you upload a pre-built ActivitiExplorer WAR file to a Nexus repo or install it to your local Maven repo.  Since it includes the Explorer POM within it, all the artifact and group ID details are automagically inferred by Maven.  Then, create your own Maven WAR project (packaging=war) which will hold your custom Explorer web-app.  I gave mine a similar name, but used a different groupID, artifactID, and version in my pom.xml file.  Add the repository reference in your pom.xml to your 3rd party Nexus, if you went that path.  Add this dependency to your pom.xml, substituting the proper Activiti version:

<code>
<dependency>
   <groupId>org.activiti</groupId>
   <artifactId>activiti-webapp-rest2</artifactId>
   <version>5.16.1</version>
   <type>war</type>
   <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>
</code>

Finally, create new versions of the files you want to replace in the original Explorer WAR, and place them in the usual Maven project directories, and these will overwrite the ones in the original WAR file.

If all you want to do is provide your own property values, you can probably do that by tweaking Tomcat config files to have them inserted onto the classpath in such a way to override what is in the off-the-shelf WAR file (no custom Explorer build required).  If you want to provide custom implementations of various extensible components, whereby you are adding classes to the WAR… then creating a WAR overlay might be the way to go.

[jbarrez]

That is indeed another way of doing it. Thanks for sharing!

[aimingxu]

Hi Gregdavisfromnj, we are try to do exactly the same: rebuild with config changes such as using JNDI and Oracle. When I am reading Maven WAR packaging overlays, it said that the web.xml file above comes from documentedproject not from documentedprojectdependency. How you solve it? Can you share your pom? Thanks!