Designing Efficient BPM Applications

Chapter 12. Connecting to Other Systems

In the previous chapter, you created processes to deal with modifying or cancelling a vacation request.

This chapter explains how to add connections from your process to external systems. These connections are not part of the BPMN standard, but most BPM software includes features for exchanging information with external systems. In Bonita BPM, these features are called connectors.

You will use two connectors, one to send email and another to create and manage a calendar entry corresponding to each vacation request.

Email Connectors

When you created the processes, you added several service tasks that send an email message. At each of these tasks, you must configure an email connector with the message header (To, Sender, and Subject) and the message content.

To make the process more flexible, the values that are static for a deployment or that are used in more than one connector can be stored in a parameter. A parameter is declared for a process, and the value is the same each time it is used in the process. Parameters are configured when you prepare a process for deployment, so it is easy to update them. For example, if you use a parameter for the email server address, you can use your local email server for testing during development, but use the company email server in production without changing the process definition, simply by changing the parameter value.

First define the parameters, then define the email connectors, as described in ...