3 Ways to Empower Employee Vacation Request Process

Planning a vacation? Submit your request through
the JBoss BPM Vacation Request process!

We look forward to it the whole year, don't we?

Vacation, that magical word that brings to mind sunny beaches, care free days of doing nothing, cocktails with frilly umbrellas and a stress free existence.

Often in an organization where we work, to get our vacation planned involves a paper request for days off. A bit inefficient and a pain in the backside when we have to wait on paper approval chains and manual tasks to be completed.

Why not just automate this simple process as a part of our human resources service chain?

Today we offer you a solution, JBoss BPM Vacation Request process, brought to you by a North American Red Hat Solutions Architect, Kent Hua who works out on the West Coast. Be sure to reach out and thank him personally for his contribution.

Paper vacation planning should be a thing of the past.

3 ways to empower

The solution demo offered here is showcasing JBoss BPM Suite, containerization and deployments into the Cloud with OpenShift Enterprise. The three deployment options are local to your own machine, running containerized and finally running on OpenShift Enterprise as your private PaaS.

This example project is a simple vacation request process project for employees to request PTO / Vacation days. It demonstrates the following functionality:

• Rest service (GET & POST)
• Human Task assignment and escalation
• Business Rule for auto approval

This is a vacation process example which calls out to a REST service to get vacation information based on a particular ID. Based on the rule for hours requested (10 hours or less), the request is auto approved or is routed to a manager. When the manager claims but does not complete the task in 30 seconds, it's automatically returned to the group. Once approved or not approved, the original requester can see the status.

To install one of the three options, just follow along:

Option 1 - Install on your machine

1. Download and unzip.
2. Add products to installs directory. For example download and add BPMS installer jar into the installs directory.
3. Run 'init.sh' or 'init.bat' file. 'init.bat' must be run with Administrative privileges.
4. Start JBoss BPMS Server by running 'standalone.sh' or 'standalone.bat' in the /target/jboss-eap-6.4/bin directory.
5. Login to http://localhost:8080/business-central

    - login for admin and other roles (u:erics / p:bpmsuite1!)
   

Option 2 - Install on Red Hat CDK OpenShift Enterprise image

Leverage the Red Hat CDK to demonstrate
application development on
Red Hat Cloud Suite.

The following steps can be used to install this demo on OpenShift Enterprise using the Red Hat Container Development Kit (CDK)

1. App Dev Cloud with JBoss Vacation Request Demo

Option 3 - Generate containerized installation

The following steps can be used to configure and run the demo in a container

1. Download and unzip.
2. Add product installer to installs directory. For example download and add BPMS installer jar into the installs directory.
3. Copy contents of support/docker directory to the project root.
4. Build demo image

   docker build -t jbossdemocentral/bpms-vacation-request-demo .
   

5. Start demo container

   docker run -it -p 8080:8080 -p 9990:9990 jbossdemocentral/bpms-vacation-request-demo
   

6. Login to http://<DOCKER_HOST>:8080/business-central

    - login for admin and other roles (u:erics / p:bpmsuite1!)
   

Red Hat Cloud Suite

Note: Replace localhost with DOCKER_HOST when it appears in other locations within the documentation.

Enjoy this all new vacation request example process and stay tuned for more!