Alfresco Process Services extension project - Alfresco DevCon 2018

Alfresco Process Services
Extension Project
Dennis Koch

Learn. Connect. Collaborate.
Questions to be (hopefully) answered in 5 minutes
• Why would you need an APS extension project?
• How to setup an APS extension project?
• How to work with my favorite IDE?
• How to build the actual extension?
• How to install the extension?
• Anything else worth to mention?

Why would you need an APS extension project?
• Executing custom logic as part of a process:
– Example 1: A process contains a service task, referencing a bean and that
bean executes some custom logic.
– Example 2: A process is making use of store entity tasks, using a custom data
model, that is using an implementation of AlfrescoCustomDataModelService
– APS scans for those beans in the com.activti.extension.bean package

• Executing custom logic as part of a process
• Extending the APS REST API:
– Example: Add custom endpoints to either the public or the internal APS REST
API
– Depending on which API shall be extended, one has to implement a new class
in the package com.activiti.extension.rest or com.activiti.extension.api
– I recommend my lightning talk „APS REST API“ tomorrow for more details
1

• Extending the APS REST API
• Implementing different offered APS interfaces
– APS offers several interfaces that can be implemented for certain scenarios
– Example: In order to tweak the Activiti process engine configuration, one can
implement the ProcessEngineConfigurationConfigurer interface in the
package com.activiti.extension.conf

• Extending the APS REST API
• Implementing different offered APS interfaces
• Implementing a custom Identity Synchronization/Authentication
– Example: Instead of syncing with an external Identity Management system like
LDAP/AD, one wants to sync users from another IDM source
– One has to extend the AbstractExternalIdmSourceSyncService in the
package com.activiti.extension.bean
– NOTE: Not only synchronization needs to be extended, but also a new
AuthenticationProvider has to be implemented

How to setup an APS extension project?
• Make sure prerequisites are fulfilled:
– Have Oracle JDK 1.8 installed
– Have JAVA_HOME environment variable set accordingly
– Have Apache Maven 3.2.5 or above installed
– Have M2_HOME environment variable set accordingly
– Have MAVEN_OPTS="-Xms1024m -Xmx1G“ set

• APS extension project uses APS Maven dependencies
• APS dependencies are pulled from Alfresco’s Nexus repository accessible
at https://artifacts.alfresco.com
• Raise a case with Alfresco Support to get credentials for Nexus and the
contained APS repository
2

• Create a project directory, e.g aps-extension
• Create a pom.xml file in this directory with the following content:

• Create a project directory, e.g aps-extension
• Create a pom.xml file in this directory with the following content:
3

• Create the following Maven project base folder structure following the
Maven standard directory layout

• Add package folders, based on what you actually plan to
implement/extend
– e.g. add com/activiti/extension/bean to implement Service Task beans
– e.g. add com/activiti/extension/api to extend the public REST API
– e.g. add com/activiti/extension/conf to implement configuration interfaces
– etc.

How to work with my favorite IDE?
• Modern IDEs support Maven projects, so you could have done previous
steps directly in your IDE
• If you started on the file system, you can simply import the project as
existing Maven project into your IDE
• Create new packages for new extensions and the related classes directly
in your development environment

How to build the actual extension?
• Run “mvn clean install” on the Maven project
• Build process is starting with the following output:
• Required dependendencies are downloaded from Nexus:
• The build completes:
• Project folder has a target folder created containing the built extension jar
4

• Run “mvn clean install” on the Maven project
• Build process is starting with the following output:
• Required dependendencies are downloaded from Nexus:
• The build completes:
• Project folder has a target folder created containing the built extension jar

• In case of failure, inspect the thrown Error
• Identify the issue, correct it and then re-run build with “mvn –install”

How to install the extension?
• Copy the jar from your project to activiti-app/WEB-INF/lib
• Restart the APS deployment

Anything else worth to mention?
• The extension project is really thought to quickly develop something and
drop the extension library into an existing APS deployment
• One cannot run APS from within the extension project and there is
currently no SDK for APS like we offer it for ACS
• Alfresco SDK has an experimental feature to run APS via “–P run” but this
is not officially supported nor documented yet.
• Follow the SDK channels closely for future updates 

Alfresco Process Services
Extension Project
Thank you!

Alfresco Process Services extension project - Alfresco DevCon 2018

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