I am a begginer to flowable. I can use the flowable-ui and modeler to create process. But, I want to use my web app as front-end and flowable engine as backend, i.e., the user can submit data through my custom webpage forms for any task. How do I do this?
As per my knowledge, You can achieve this in 2 ways:
- Build your own rest api(backend, may be using spring boot) which internally communicate with flowable engine to perform task like case, process creation. Some thing like adding façade layer in between your web app & flowable engine.
- Let your web app directly communicate with flowable rest api.
If you are not happy with my answer, wait for official FLOWABLE Employee’s.
Regards,
AKV
Thanks for suggestion @anoopkv89 . I want to go with the 2nd option.
In the documentation it says
> Flowable includes a REST API to the Flowable engine that can be installed by deploying the flowable-rest.war file to a servlet container like Apache Tomcat. However, it can also be used in another web-application by including the servlet (and/or its mappings) in your application and add all flowable-rest dependencies to the classpath.
Can you tell if I am correct that by servlet they mean the rest war file? and if so should I include it in the Resources folder?
I worked in spring boots so I add rest dependency in pom.xml. But according to the given paragraph, it look like you can add rest api related jars in classpath of your project.
Within the distribution you will find the referenced flowable-rest application. This can be started both as an executable jar Spring Boot style and dropped into a servlet container such as Tomcat.
You can also run the flowable-rest container published on DockerHub: Docker Hub
Either way you will then be able to access OpenAPI (Swagger) docs at http://localhost:8080/flowable-rest/docs and try out the various APIs.
Of course you may also find you want to aggregate functions or augment with other behaviour in which case you’ll need to embed flowable in your own rest app as mentioned by @anoopkv89