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Start an Activiti Process via Rest Script in CrafterCMS

Applicable to CrafterCMS 3.0
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Russ Danner

Activiti is a powerful open source workflow engine built by Alfresco.  Incorporating a workflow engine into your customer and employee facing sites and portals is an excellent solution for automating complex workflows that cross system boundaries while providing the user with a simple to use, contextual user experience.   Working for a bank or an insurance company and need to workflow contracts with customers?  No problem. CrafterCMS (the open-source Java-based CMS for enterprises) paired with Alfresco is a perfect solution.  It’s customer friendly, highly scalable and about as powerful as enterprise technology gets!

In this blog, I’ll demonstrate the most straightforward example of a CrafterCMS REST service being used to start an Activiti Process.

Prerequisites

  • You have Activiti (http://www.activiti.org/) installed
    NOTE:
    The authentication and process are hard coded to simplify the example

Step 1: Create a REST Controller

  • Under Scripts/rest right click and click create controller
  • Enter start-process.get as the controller name
  • Add the following code to the controller. This code assumes Activiti is deployed into the same container as Crafter Engine.
    @Grab('org.codehaus.groovy.modules.http-builder:http-builder:0.7')
@Grab('oauth.signpost:signpost-core:1.2.1.2')
@Grab('oauth.signpost:signpost-commonshttp4:1.2.1.2')

import groovyx.net.http.HTTPBuilder
import groovyx.net.http.ContentType
import groovyx.net.http.Method
import groovyx.net.http.RESTClient

def http = new HTTPBuilder("http://localhost:8080")
def user = "kermit"
def password = "kermit"
def authPair = user + ":" + password
def authEncoded = authPair.bytes.encodeBase64().toString()

http.setHeaders([Authorization: "Basic "+authEncoded])

def ret = null

http.request( Method.POST ) {

uri.path = "/activiti-rest/service/runtime/process-instances"

 // ACTIVITI ENTERPRISE URL 
// uri.path = "/activiti-app/api/enterprise/process-instances" requestContentType = ContentType.JSON body = [ processDefinitionKey: "vacationRequest", variables:[ [name:"employeeName", value: "Russ"], [name:"numberOfDays", value: "5"],[name:"startDate", value:"10-08-2015 11:11"],[name:"vacationMotivation", value: "rest"] ]] response.success = { resp, reader -> ret = reader } } return ret

     

     

Step2: Execute the Service

  • Open a browser and hit the following URL:
    • http://localhost:8080/api/1/services/start-process.json

Step 3: Verify that a new process instance has been started

  • Open a browser and hit the following URL:
    • http://localhost:8080/activiti-rest/service/runtime/process-instances
    • Every time you run your Crafter REST service, the instance count returned in the above Activiti service will increase
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