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.

[jbarrez]

And gave it some well-deserved exposure: http://www.jorambarrez.be/blog/2012/11/02/using-activiti-with-xform-or-why-having-a-community-rocks/

[smirzai]

Hi Joram.
Thank you for your nice motivating post.
Can you think of a nice way of supporting xforms in Activiti natively ? As I mentioned, I already tried to that with "activiti explorer", but in vain.
It would be really nice that explorer could support third party form definition protocols.

[dqvn]

I think Activiti Engine could suffice to building more complex form type. Which more or less can alter for the x-form as well.
Following this solution, you could write the complex form in one popup window and return the customizing string as you need.
Please reference to the "SelectUserField.java" in package "org.activiti.explorer.ui.form" for more detail.

[b_schnarr]

Even though I sent a pn to smirzai, I want to post my question again for the public.

Our company uses an IBM ECM-Product to store documents and we want to use Activiti as the (document) workflow engine in this system.
Therefore, we do not want to use the Activiti Explorer for the form rendering. Instead, we want to achieve that the forms are directly displayed in the ECM-GUI and the communication to Activiti should be realized via REST Web-Services.

I still cannot figure out how Activiti works together with xForms in general. Even though I read the Activiti documentation carefully, I cannot figure out which purpose the Activiti form-key has.

Lets say we have a stand alone deployment of Activiti and this ECM-System. Would it be possible to realize the form rendering with X-Forms in the ECM-System and the communication with Activiti via Rest Web Services? Then the question is, where those xForms need to be stored and how the ECM-System knows which form to display…

Any idea and comment is appreciated
Thank you very much and best regards
Ben

[jbarrez]

"I still cannot figure out how Activiti works together with xForms in general. Even though I read the Activiti documentation carefully, I cannot figure out which purpose the Activiti form-key has."

The form key is what the name indicates. A key to find your form. Wherever this is stored.
It can be 'myfunnyform.json' which is stored in the deployment. It can be 'some/path/to/the/form/form.xml' if it needs path info. It can be just an id number if you store forms in  a db.

The Activiti will just give you that Form key back. Nothing more, the rest is up to you.