Activiti FormKey Property

[jeenut]

I wish to attach an external form to start event and to user tasks in an Activiti project. However, adding the name of the custom form file in the field, doesn't direct me to the form in Activiti Explorer.

Can someone please hep by listing out the steps to attach an external form to Activiti pojects, to make sure that I am not missing out on some step.. 

[jearles]

Hi Jeenu,

Another active user on these forums Greg Harley has previously written an example of this, using Alpaca Forms - the project called 'activiti-alpaca' is located here. Be aware, it was built using Activiti 5.14 and there have been some Rest API changes in Activiti since then, meaning, the code will not work in 5.22/newer-versions without some changes to the REST calls.

Hopefully it will give you an idea of what you're looking at doing, and how to complete it.

-JEarles

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[jeenut]

Thank you Jonathan for the prompt reply.

I had looked at this project before. But I wasn't able to understand it fully. I am trying to take one step at a time in understanding building projects in Activiti. So, can I please take the liberty of asking a few basic questions. 

1. Where in this project is the form key being set?

2. I wish to take a look at how this project looks like. But I can't find any .bpmn/.bpmn.20.xml file in the project. How do I deploy this in Activiti explorer? 

In my case, I am using Activiti version 5.18.0 and I am using the explorer app. Even if I put in a random value for form key in the project, the project works as if there was nothing given, i.e. it  doesn't even give an error. It looks like the property form key is not being processed. I can't understand why is that so. 

Any help will be appreciated.

Regards,

Jeenu

[jearles]

I found an instance of this concept being discussed in a previous forum post, and an Alfresco employee responded with some helpful links and suggestions. Here is another example using Vaadin, which shows specifically what you're asking about relating to the form key utilization.

The form key is actually set on the Activiti side of things and utilized by your external app to match the custom UI to the Activiti form data. Take a look at the 'ActivitiFormRest.js' file within the Activiti-Alpaca application, particularly the 'getTaskFormById' function - that passes the form data back to Alpaca, that then handles rendering.

-JEarles