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IDE environment in IBM BPM migrated from Eclipse-based app to WebPD, a web-based process editor. WebPD built on top of IBM BPM Coach Framework, based on dojo toolkit, hosting complex visual editors suffers from performance and stability issues. It can simply reload itself mid your work (because of some internal broken assertion), editor can stuck and manual reload is needed etc. The more artifacts opened the less stable it is. To limit resource consumption and countermeasure poor experience IBM introduced limit of 10 simultaneously opened artifacts. Fine. Unless you run BPM debug session that opens dozen of nested artifacts and fails badly. Then either you stay out of luck or you hack it this way. Continue reading →

Internet Explorer – a black sheep amongst browsers – should be forgotten long ago, yet it stands strong as a standard in many organizations. And while its last incarnation (IE11) adopted some modern web technologies it still offers lurking traps ready to ruin your day. Consider allegedly supported webworkers: when created from Blob IE11 cannot load any resources via XHR and when attempted to be created from separate JS file, IE11 will fail with specfic response headers. All these gotchas combined with headaches of IBM BPM got me to tipping point for sharing my thoughs here. Continue reading →

Imagine you want to see all IBM BPM coach validation errors in one place. By default after validation phase you need to find all invalidated widgets one by one, changing tab or opening accordions, and so on. Coach framework does not give any programmatic tool to get all validation messages from inside of coach view. While SPARK / BPMUI library gives some helper functions it does not cover all cases. Here I discuss simple way to plug-in to (or hack) coach engine and SPARK library to collect all validations at once. Continue reading →

Early 2017 cumulative fix for IBM BPM 8.5.7 brought new section in properties for coach views configuration – events tab. This looks like a wink at SPARK toolkit being integrated with BPM product. SPARK introduced nice concept of configuration options storing Javascript code created outside of coach views, events code as one of them. Configuration option was limited to one line string however. New editor in events tab is multi-line with code coloring. It has also nasty trap for young players though, let’s take a look. Continue reading →

Boundary Event is core concept of UI technology in IBM BPM: any visual element (coach view) of screen (coach) can fire such event moving control from current screen to some other place, crossing “screen boundary“. In fact Boundary Event is the only way to make such transition on diagram of coaches. Problem is that IBM BPM event model is trivial and does not allow virtually any interference with event in progress, one cannot change event bubbling or handle it in try-catch manner. Find how I bypassed this limitation and implemented events interceptor.

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Salientprocess acquisition by IBM will make SPARK toolkit core part of IBM BPM in future release. SPARK introduces some nice new concepts, one of it is addressing that keeps SPARK containers invisible. Its public API promises to make your own coach view a container and I needed it on my code. So I tried and it did not work. Few hours of experiments with debugging SPARK code led me to workaround and defect report. Continue reading →