webMethods

Products: webMethods BPM 10.5

Problem:
We have a requirement to use User Tasks in our Process Models.
Due to network architectural restrictions, we are not allowed to let business users from few domains access to MWS, which resides in our Integration Area Network.
Also customer is not very keen on using CAF UI.

I was looking for ways to come up with custom solution for this using Task Inbox APIs.

Could you please help me with answers to below questions:

Can we use any other UI technology for creating Task UIs ? For Example: Servlet JSPs
Can we host Task UIs outside MWS, for example: JSP UIs hosted on Tomcat server

Also if you have any other suggestions or experiences to share feel free to write.

Thank you.

Hi Hitesh,

beside of Legacy CAF UI there is a feature called “OpenCAF” available.
You might want to check this out.
See Caf_and_OpenCAF_Development_Help.pdf for further informations.

On the other side you can prepare an additional MWS in a dedicated presentation layer, which in turn connects to the IS in the integration layer.
In this case it would be a good idea to use the TaskEngine Runtime in IS instead of that one in MWS.

Regards,
Holger

Addendum:

I just found these on Software AG´s Github:

Regards,
Holger

Thank you Holger for your responses.
I will check on these options.

Moving MWS to presentation layer was definitely a way to go, but customer is not keen on using CAF thus we did not go ahead in this direction.

A quick look through OpenCAF indicates it is simply an advancement over caf, with responsive design, and better support for Javascript Libraries. I will check more on this.

But my initial thought is it may not well align with customer’s needs. And I still need to explore possibilities to make it work with other UI technologies.

Feel free to share more thoughts and ideas in this regard.

Regards,
Hitesh

I wouldn’t recommend OpenCAF, it hasn’t been updated in a while and is more to ensure that customers have continuation for their existing investment. If you are working afresh go with a modern JS based platform, I’m a fan of Angular myself.

The nice thing now is that everything runs in the browser and is API driven, so you can even host the app in a webMethods package (via the pub folder) and access APIs directly without requiring additional runtimes nor the headache of managing CORS.
regards,
John

One can use the TE API layer and develop non-CAF UI:
webMethods Task Engine API and Service Reference (softwareag.com)

Thank you John & Meglena for your responses.

So far I have tried creating regular User Task, but I skipped creating CAF based Task UI for this.
I then used Task Engine Rest APIs to get the task details in a flow service, and complete the task. And this worked well.

This is a good starting point.

I will explore it further and update this thread.

Thank you.

Hello All,

I was able to create a POC using Task Engine APIs and JSP Servlet UI and create a custom solution to work with User tasks.
Primarily we need to work with get and put methods of opentask API.
Based on experience creating Task User Interface for complex Task document types will be a bit of a challenge here.

Thank you all for the suggestions and inputs on this topic.