ProcessIdbyPath: A more user-friendly method to get the process-id from Guided Procedures Processes

[richard_hirsch]

If you look at the current ways to initiate a Guided Procedure (GP) process , you will find that that they all require the instance id, which is a cryptic string (5254ED00A4A811DBA284000C2929AF6E).

How do you expect users (a BPX for example) to be able to remember this string?  Of course, if the user has the access to the GP run-time that this isn't necessary - the user can start the instance using the User Interface.  What about, however, users who don't have access to the runtime or those users / services that just have a web-service interface.  What about accessing it via its folder structure? - I worked in various projects that involved the use of resources in a Knowledge Management environment where one of the common ways to access a resource is via its path (of course, this is related to the Resource’s RID).

What about using a process' path to get the process id?

The code below shows how to do this using Web Dynpro (Thanks to Claudiu Tatulea and Mihaela Blum for doing all the development work based on my minimal description). We have created a simple web-service with an “IN” parameter being the path variable and the “OUT” parameter being the process ID.

Here is the gallery structure in the GP Designtime environment.

Here is the process ID.

And here is the web-service viewed in the Web-Services Navigator.

Code

There are two methods in the web-service:

• getProcessID  is the heart of the web-service and returns the process-id
• getCategoryFromPath returns the category from the path parameter in the web-service

   public String getProcessID(String path) {      String result;      try {        IGPDesigntimeManager designtimeManager=          GPProcessFactory.getDesigntimeManager();        IUser anon_user= UMFactory.getAnonymousUserFactory().getAnonymousUser();        IGPUserContext userContext=          GPContextFactory.getContextManager().createUserContext(anon_user);        if (path != null) {          int lastSeparator= path.lastIndexOf('/');          if (lastSeparator > 0) {            String actualPath= path.substring(0, lastSeparator);            String processName=              path.substring(lastSeparator + 1, path.length());            IGPCategory category=              getCategoryFromPath(actualPath, userContext, designtimeManager);            if (category != null) {              IGPProcessInfo[] processes=                designtimeManager.getActiveProcessTemplatesByCategory(                  category.getID(),                  userContext);              int theOne= -1;              for (int i= 0; i < processes.length; i++)                if (processes[i].getTitle().equalsIgnoreCase(processName)) {                  theOne= i;                  i= processes.length;                }              if (theOne != -1)                result= processes[theOne].getID();              else                result= "process not found";            } else              result= "path not found";            //    throw new Exception("path not found");          } else            result= "invalid path";          //    throw new Exception("invalid path");        } else          result= "please specify path and process name";        //    throw new Exception("please specify path and process name");        return result;      } catch (Exception e) {        return null;      }    }    private IGPCategory getCategoryFromPath(      String path,      IGPUserContext userContext,      IGPDesigntimeManager designtimeManager)      throws Exception {      StringTokenizer st= new StringTokenizer(path, "/");      int tokenCount= st.countTokens();      IGPCategory[] categories=        designtimeManager.getRootCategory(userContext).getSubCategories();      IGPCategory category= null;      boolean found= true;      int tokenPos= 0;      while (st.hasMoreTokens()) {        int i= 0;        String token= st.nextToken();        while ((i < categories.length)          && (!token            .equalsIgnoreCase(              categories[i].resolveTitle(userContext.getLocale())))) {          i++;        }        if (i < categories.length) {          if (tokenPos == tokenCount - 1)            return categories[i];          else            categories= categories[i].getSubCategories();        } else {          found= false;          break;        }        tokenPos++;      }      return null;    }  }

The creation of the web-service is easy for a Web Dynpro developer, so I haven’t included the other steps involving this procedure.