Newbie. Is possible to use xforms with Activiti

[ruospalo]

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.

[smirzai]

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

[jbarrez]

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

[smirzai]

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

[ronald_van_kuij]

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

[jbarrez]

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

[ronald_van_kuij]

🙂

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

[smirzai]

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.

[ronald_van_kuij]

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

[jbarrez]

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!

[smirzai]

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.