How To Import Any JBoss BPM Suite Example Project

This tips & tricks comes to you after I have been asked the following repeatedly over the last few weeks by users of the JBoss BPM Suite demos:

"How can I import the projects associated with the various JBoss BPM Suite demo projects into my own existing installation?"

What this means is that users want to have an example project in their personal installation of the product without using the projects installation process. This is certainly possible but not totally obvious to everyone.

Below I will walk you through how the various example projects for JBoss BPM Suite are setup, how the actual BPM projects are loaded into JBoss BPM Suite when you set them up and why. After this I will show you how to extract any of the available BPM projects for importing in to any previously installed JBoss BPM Suite server.

Figure 1: In JBoss BPM Suite open the Administration perspective with menu options, Authoring -> Administration.

Background on how it works

The normal installation of a JBoss BPM Suite demo project that I have provided uses a template. This template ensures that the process is always the same; download, unzip, add products and run the installation script. After doing this, you are done, just fire up the JBoss BPM Suite for the adjusted experience where you open up the Authoring perspective to a pretty process designer with the demo project displayed for you to kick off a demo run.

These projects have a demo template that provides some consistency and you can read about how it works in a previous article.  For the initial installation run of any of these demo projects, a folder is copied from support/bpm-suite-demo-niogit to the installation at the location target/jboss-eap-{version}/bin/.niogit. 

Figure 2: To import a new project, open the Clone repository from the menu Repositories. This will allow you to bring in any BPM project to your JBoss BPM Suite.

This folder contains all of the project and system Git repositories that are formatted for the version of the project you have downloaded. By installing this directory or complete repository, when JBoss BPM Suite starts up the first time, it will pick up the state I left it in when designing the experience around you using this demo project.

Get your hands on a specific BPM project

The problem I want to help you with in this article is to show you how to extract only the BPM project from one of these examples and import this into your own installation of JBoss BPM Suite.

The following list is the order you do the tasks, after which I will explain each one:

1. Download any JBoss BPM Suite demo project and unzip (or clone it if you like).
2. Log in to your own JBoss BPM Suite and open Administration perspective via menu: Authoring -> Administration.
3. Setup the new BPM project you want to import: Repositories -> Clone repository -> fill in details including import project URL
4. Explore the new project in the Authoring perspective: Authoring -> Project Authoring

Figure 3: Cloning a repository is how you import an existing project, which requires the information shown.

In your current installation where you are logged in,  open the Administration perspective as shown in figure 1 by menu options Authoring -> Administration. This allows you to start importing any existing BPM project. We will be importing the Customer Evaluation BPM project by using the feature to clone existing projects found in menu options, Repositories -> Clone repository as shown in figure 2.

Figure 4: Once the project has been imported (cloned), you will receive this message in a pop-up.

Figure 5: Explore your newly imported BPM project in the authoring perspective within your JBoss BPM Suite installation.

The most interesting bit here is the Git URL, which is normally something hosted online, but this project we want to import is positioned locally in our filesystem, so we use a file based URL to point to it. Click on Clone button to import the project and you should see a pop-up that looks like figure 4 stating that you have successfully imported your project.

Now you can explore the new imported project in your authoring perspective and proceed as you desire with this project as shown in figure 5. This will work for any project I have put together for the field that is based on the standard template I use.

I hope this tips & tricks helps you to explore and enjoy as many of the existing BPM examples offered in the current collection of demo projects.