I have a client who uses Alfresco Activiti and Alfresco One that would consider moving to Flowable and Alfresco Community Edition, but there are gaps in functionality between the two.
The gaps that are most important to this client are:
LDAP integration. Currently it seems that users and groups are managed completely within Flowable. It would be nice if we could point to a directory and sync both users and groups.
Alfresco-centric tasks, such as “publish to repository”. Business users want to be able to design processes that include pushing data to enterprise repositories. In my case this is Alfresco, but this could really be any CMIS repository.
Generating documents from form data. Business users want to be able to design document templates and then fill those templates with form data to produce a document such as a PDF.
Start processes and manage tasks from within Alfresco Share. In the Alfresco enterprise setup, this is provided by the Share Connector. Business users who leverage Alfresco Share to manage documents do not want to have to jump back-and-forth between their process application UI and their document management UI. They want to be able to management documents as well as processes from a single application.
I don’t see any of these items on the roadmap. Will they be added to the roadmap any time soon? If not, does anyone know if any of these are being addressed by others in the community? If not, there is a possibility that my client will fund work to close some of these gaps.
Good to see you on the Flowable forum.
We do have a flowable-ldap module and the IdentityService interface is pluggable with the LDAP module. It just needs a bit more work to document it and maybe make it a bit easier to plugin. Having CMIS specific service tasks and a service task to generate a document is something that would be nice to have, it’s not yet planned on the roadmap but could be prioritised when there’s more interest. Adding a UI to Share is probably not something that would be offered by the Flowable project, but maybe someone from the Flowable community would be interested in developing this.
Good to know about flowable-ldap. We will take a look at that.
If anyone in the community has already made progress on any of the
remaining items, definitely provide links here so that the rest of us can
participate. Otherwise, if we implement some or all of these as part of
this client project and make them available I’ll add those links here as
well.
Just a quick update. I knocked out some simple integrations to address these gaps. All of them are Java Delegate classes.
For “generating documents from form data” I used docx4j because it was easier to use that than POI to create Word docs and Excel spreadsheets from “templates” where a “template” is just a Word doc or spreadsheet that contains placeholder variables like ${sowNumber}.
For “publish to repository” I just used Chemistry OpenCMIS. Instead of doing something fancy like leveraging single sign-on between Flowable and Alfresco, I just used a “service account” to authenticate with the CMIS repo (Alfresco in this case). A similar approach could be used for “set properties” and “download from repository”.
The target path, content type, etc., are read from execution variables.
Unfortunately, none of this is able to be open sourced at this time. But it is simple enough that anyone should be able to implement using these tips with little effort.
The bigger task would be to write an integration that sits on the Alfresco side, similar to the Alfresco Share Connector. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad using a service account approach for that as well, at least initially.
Thanks for sharing this. Docx4j looks like a nice way to provide document generation capabilities in Flowable. Let’s see if someone from the community is interested in developing this kind of feature.