Eric D. Schabell: July 2010

Friday, July 30, 2010

JBoss BRMS Decision Table Double Quotes Errors (Open Office)

When using JBoss BRMS to manage your rules you might consider using Decision Tables. It is quite common to generate your decision tables in XLS files (spreadsheets) and this will be default on most Linux machines result in an Open Office spreadsheet. When you put a CONDITION field with for example:

setValue("$param");

You would expect the quotes to be converted properly, but Open Office morphs these and you will see the following when trying to create add you decision table to your KnowledgeBuilder:

KnowledgeBuilder kbuilder = KnowledgeBuilderFactory.newKnowledgeBuilder();
DecisionTableConfiguration config = KnowledgeBuilderFactory.newDecisionTableConfiguration();
config.setInputType(DecisionTableInputType.XLS);
kbuilder.add(ResourceFactory.newClassPathResource("MyDemoDecisionTable.xls"), ResourceType.DTABLE, config);

// Exception you can expect is like this:
//
[8,29]: [ERR 101] Line 18:11 no viable alternative at input ''

To avoid this just cut&paste your quotes from the command line for example I type this in a console and then just select the line to paste into my Open Office field:
$ "$param"

Hope it saves you some headaches and time...

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

JFall 2010 - What does your jBPM future hold?

I like the NLJUG sessions and could not pass when the call for papers was made and I have submitted the following paper to JFall 2010:

Abstract
 With the recent shift to unify the projects DroolsFlow and jBPM4.x into jBPM5, we are all wondering what the impact could be to our existing BPM projects. What is new in jBPM5? What does one need to be aware of? What does one need to prepare in advance for a move to this new platform? All these questions and more will be discussed in this session.

First, we will take a look at what has happened historically within jBPM to get us where we are now, with jBPM3.x and jBPM4.x versions. We will discuss DroolsFlow in relation to the path towards jBPM5. Next we will take a look at the Request for Comments (RFC) that was put into the community and resulting architecture for the future of BPM within JBoss Middleware. This leads to a closer look at the resulting jBPM5 road map and how this will relate to the JBoss Enterprise BPM products moving towards the future.

Finally we will provide a plan for positioning your existing Enterprise jBPM projects for the eventual move towards jBPM5. This will cover the architectural layers involved, a look at the tooling being created for this and steps you can take to ensure a smooth transition moving into your jBPM future.


See you there on 3 November 2010?