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Starting a Process with the BPM APILocate this document in the navigation structure

Use

With the Business Process Management (BPM) application programming interfaces (APIs), you can customize and enhance the way you use business processes and execute tasks. This document describes how you start a deployed process using the BPM API. For a detailed description of the BPM public APIs, see http://help.sap.com/javadocs.

Prerequisites

  • You have added the necessary dependencies to development component tc/bpem/facade/ear (public part api ) in software component BPEM-FACADE and tc/je/sdo21/api in software component ENGFACADE.

Procedure

  1. Retrieve the ProcessDefinitionManager.

    ProcessDefinitionManager processDefinitionManager = BPMFactory.getProcessDefinitionManager();

  2. Get the active process definition of a specified process deployed on the server.

    ProcessDefinition processDefinition = processDefinitionManager.getActiveProcessDefinition(VENDOR, DC_NAME, PROCESS_NAME);

  3. Retrieve the ProcessStartManager.

    ProcessStartManager processStartManager = BPMFactory.getProcessStartManager();

  4. Get the start event of the process definition.

    In the current version of SAP BPM, only one start event is supported for each active pool; therefore, the result will contain one element only.

    Set<ProcessStartEvent> processStartEvents = processStartManager.getProcessStartEvents(processDefinition.getId());
ProcessStartEvent processStartEvent = processStartEvents.iterator().next();

  5. Create a data object for the start event, adhering to the service interface definition assigned to the start event.

    DataObject processStartDataObject = processStartManager.createDataObjectForStartEvent(processStartEvent);

  6. Fill in the data object with valid input data for the process.

    processStartDataObject.setString(processStartDataObject.getType().getProperty(FIELD_CUSTOMER), VALUE_CUSTOMER);

  7. Start the process with the start event and the matching input data.

    The call returns the ID of the process instance that was just started.

    URI processInstanceId = processStartManager.startProcess(processStartEvent, processStartDataObject);
Note

For conditional start processes, invocations of 'startProcess(...)' are rejected to avoid a multi match scenario through a manual start. With the isConditionalStart() method, you can check whether a process definition is a conditional start process definition. For more information, see Conditional Start.

Result

You have started a deployed process by using the BPM API.

Caution

For a correct behavior while executing the process at runtime, you have to configure the http.baseurl property. This configuration can be done in the SAP NetWeaver Administrator when you are logged with administrator rights. Choose Start of the navigation path Configuration Management Next navigation step Infrastructure Next navigation step Java System Properties End of the navigation path. Then choose the Application tab and select the tc~bpem~base~ear application.