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Start an Activiti Process via Rest Script in Crafter CMS

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. Crafter CMS (an open source Java based CMS) 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 Crafter CMS 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

Step 2: 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

Russ Danner is VP Products at Crafter Software and is responsible for product management, product development and support, and client and partner success. Russ brings over 20 years of software architecture, design, and implementation experience. Prior to Crafter Software, Russ was Web Experience Management Practice Director at Rivet Logic and project lead for the open source Crafter CMS project.