Eric D. Schabell: CodeReady Containers - Exploring a home loan mortgage process

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

CodeReady Containers - Exploring a home loan mortgage process

process automation tooling
As a cloud-native developer you've installed an OpenShift Container Platform development environment on your local machine, but what's next?

What can you do with the fully stocked container registry provided to you?

There is no better way to learn about container technologies, cloud native methods, and container-based application development than getting hands-on with great open technologies.

This article targets getting you started on your new OpenShift Container Platform 4.6 by putting the latest process automation developer tooling at your disposal together with a real project for you to deploy and explore.  Even better, if you need more help getting started, we'll provide a free online workshop where you can build this project yourself.

This articles outlines getting started exploring a home loan mortgage project on OpenShift platform. Let's get started right now exploring the new developer tooling for process design, user tasks, forms, rules, and business logic in just a few simple steps.

Process automation developer tooling

process automation tooling
This article walks through installing the Red Hat Process Automation Manager on OpenShift Container Platform on your local machine using the provided operator. It's leveraging CodeReady Containers and delivers a fully functioning container-native development experience.

This means upon logging in, you'll find a project ready to go and it delivers on the promise of a fully functioning developer process automation tooling containerized on your OpenShift Container Platform.

Install on CodeReady Containers

There are two options to install and run this project on the OpenShift Container Platform; use your own existing installation or to install on CodeReady Containers which provides you with a local OpenShift cluster.
  1. Ensure you have installed OpenShift with CodeReady Containers Easy Install

  2. Download and unzip this demo.

  3. Run 'init.sh' or 'init.bat' file. 'init.bat' must be run with Administrative privileges.

Now log in to the mortgage project to start exploring a home loan mortgage process (the address will be generated by the init script):

Want to build the mortgage process project from scratch? Try this hands-on online workshop.

process automation tooling

Running the demo

  1. Click on the "Mortgage-Demo" project to open the Mortgage Demo project.

  2. The project has a data model (Applicant, Application, Appraisal, Property, and ValidationError), 9x guided rules, a mortgage calculation guided decision table, 2x technical rules, 10x task forms, and a mortgage application process.

  3. Build and deploy version 1 of the project. Click on the "Build and Deploy" in the upper right corner.

  4. Go to "Menu -> Deploy -> Execution Servers" repository to see the mortgage_1 KIE Container deployed on the Process Automation Server.

  5. Go to "Menu -> Manage -> Process Definitions" to see the MortgageApplication process version 1.0 has been deployed.

  6. Click on the process definition line, then start a New Process Instance with button in the top right corner.

  7. Fill in the Mortgage Application form as follows and click on Submit button:

    Name: Eric D. Schabell SSN: 123456789 Annual Income: 90000 Property Address: somewhere 109 Sale Price: 200000 Mortgage Amorization: 30 Down Payment: 20000
  8. Go to "Menu -> Manage -> Process Instances" and select the process instance listed as running that you just started. This give the options to look at Instance Details, Process Variables, Documents, Logs, and Diagrams. Let's look at where this process is right now by selecting the Diagrams tab.

  9. The red box around the "Manually Appraise Borrower" task means we need to decide if our applicant is to be trusted to buy this property, so go to the "Menu -> Manage -> Tasks" and selecting the waiting task.

    process automation tooling

  10. Click on "Claim" button at the bottom followed by clicking on the "Start" task button (standards-based user task completion steps mandate these phase labels for tasks) to edit the provided task form field. There is only one field to edit, the Appraised Value so set this property to the esitmated value as follows:

    Appraised Value: 200000
  11. After submitting the form by clicking on the "Complete" button the task disappears. Go to "Menu -> Manage -> Process Instances" and in the filters panel on the left put a check-box in the "Completed" field to view completed process instances. Find your just completed process instance, select it from the list, and open the "Diagram" tab to view the greyed out boxes that depict the path taken through this mortgage process. You should see that this mortgage loan request has completed in the "Mortgage Approved" final end node of the process.

  12. You can play with various values to take different paths through the process while applying for mortgage loans. You can also explore, modify rules, redeploy the process, and try any combinations you like.

Hope you enjoy this project and your journey learning to make the most of this process automation tooling.