Wednesday, August 21, 2013

#274 New Oracle B2B book from Packt - Chapter 1 & 2

Just got my hands on -






















An excellent tome for developers and architects -

Chapter 1 - B2B Overview

This chapter gives us a short history of B2B electronic document exchange, thus setting the context for the rest of the book. It discusses the different connection models - hub and spoke, peer 2 peer etc, the relevant B2B standards - EDI X12, ebXML etc. In summary a good grounding in B2B basics.

Chapter 2 - Oracle B2B Overview

Oracle B2B sits on top of SOA Suite and leverages it's SCA architecture. For those new to SOA Suite please see  http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/soa/suite/overview/index.html

This chapter begins by guiding you thru the setup and configuration of a B2B vm, downloadable from OTN. Very useful stuff.

It then turns its attention to what B2B is - essentially an e-commerce gateway and the complexities it takes care of for us -
-Document standards
-Messaging protocols
-Transport protocols
-Packaging protocols
-Process control protocols

So what is B2B providing us with?
-Process incoming b2b docs received from remote trading partners
-Transport b2b docs to remote trading partners
-Transport security
- Support industry standard messaging protocols - As2, ebXML etc.
- Translation to and from XML
- Auditing and Reporting

Chapter 2 continues with a section on how B2B fits in with the base SOA platform - SCA, MDS etc.

In summary, a great overview of Oracle B2B - what it offers us and how it fits in with SOA Suite.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

#273 Case Management Elements - Activities, Events, Policies, Documents, Stakeholders, Milestones...



Oracle Adaptive Case Management includes the following elements -










 Now most of these are self-explanatory, however in the next couple of posts I'd like to look at how the tooling supports these. Today I'm looking at the above elements and how they are implemented in Oracle BPM 11g PS6.

A previous post introduces each element in more detail -
http://niallcblogs.blogspot.de/2013/07/259-bpm-11g-ps6-case-management-getting_1.html

Short Recap -

  • Data: the Case Data e.g. Tax return for 2012
  • Milestones/Phases e.g. Tax return checked, Tax Rebate approved
  • Outcomes: e.g. Rebate Paid / Bill sent
  • Events: e.g. Tax form arrives, phone call with tax payer
  • Stakeholders: e.g. Tax officer, VAT inspector
  • Policies: e.g. Rebate can only be paid when the Tax return has been fully processed
    • implemented via Business Rules
  • Activities: e.g. check Tax return, compute rebate, contact tax payer
  • Documents: e.g. supporting information such as receipts for 2012.
Oracle Business Rules is a good place to start looking at how these are implemented. Each Case application has a Rules component with a pre-seeded dictionary - well worth looking at.

Just open the rules component created for the Case.
Create a decision table and then create a condition -






















Browse thru some of the structures -

  • Case states include -








Events


Now to the events - these can be leveraged in Business Rules to control the flow of the case. They can also be published to external parties via EDN.
  • Case events include -









  • Activity Events





  • Lifecycle Events






 
  •  Documents Events - fired when documents are added/removed etc. to/from the content management system.






  • Milestone Events - self explanatory
 




  • Data Events pertain to the Case Data and are raised when this data is changed. by case activities or via the API.
  • User Defined Events give us the possibility to react to external events. These could be raised at runtime e.g.case worker gets a phone call from the tax payer in the Tax processing case. He could then create a user defined event - taxPayerCalled - at runtime.
The Status of certain elements can be checked -








So it is very easy to create a condition of the type -
If eventActivity = "CheckTaxReturn" and
If eventActivityType = "COMPLETED"

say we now want to set the Case Milestone - TaxReturnCheck - to completed,
and we also want to activate the activity - payTaxRebate.


We simply add the following actions to the rule

  • reachMilestone "TaxReturnCheck"
  • activateActivity "payTaxRebate"






















 Simple, isn't it?

Activities

Now to the activities -
BPM 11g ACM (Adaptive Case Mgt) currently supports 3 types of activities -
  • Human Task
  • BPM Process - for the structured part of a case
  • Custom - java classes you then register with the case model
Activities can be -
  • manual / automatic
  • conditional/unconditional (defined via Business Rule Policies)
  • repeatable 
Manual activities can be triggered by the case worker via the Case UI. Naturally the policies you define decide on which activity is available to whom and when. 
Stakeholders

according to the ORCL docs - The stakeholders are the different persons involved in the processing of the case. They are case workers that can view the case and work on it. These stakeholders can be assigned permissions on the Case artifacts.



















Conclusion

So essentially this release of Adaptive Case Management allows you to define the parameters within which the Case executes. You define the list of possible Activities. When, and to which Stakeholders these activities are available, is defined in your Policies. Regarding data - we consider Case Data and Documents. Documents are essentially collateral stored in a content management system. Case Data is the salient data used by the case workers in making their decisions.User Defined Events give us the possibility to react to external events at runtime - providing ad hoc support.


Friday, August 9, 2013

#271 Complex event Gateway as process start




















This process can be started by the Message or via the Timer.

The Timer has been defined as follows -






















The audit trail from em -









Wednesday, August 7, 2013

#269 Online BPM PS6 Modeling class...

commencing September 4th - from Oracle University -
details here

Monday, August 5, 2013

#268 ADF Mobile and BPM - step 1 setting up the environment

I first installed JDev 11.1.2.4 - available Here
 I ran check for updates and installed the ADF Mobile. my build was 11.1.2.4.39.64.44 
Then I followed The Instructions 

The demo worked fine. Deployment took circa 3 minutes - due to the Debug mode setting -















To speed this up, I just followed Shay Shmeltzer's bog post Here

































Then when deploying -















Deployment takes half the time - Thanks Shay!