Configuring IBM Process Designer to connect to a different virtual server

As you all know, the IBM Process Designer needs a Process Center to connect to (the binding is shown on the figure below). Sometimes it might be handy to know how to switch one process center to another (e.g. different virtual images with the IBM software).

This howto supposes you are using IBM Process Designer 8.5. and Windows 7 as you guest OS.

IBM BPM Components structure, resource: www-304.ibm.com

It's pretty simple. IBM Process Designer (former Lombardi) is based on eclipse. That means it has eclipse.ini file for configurations. One of the configuration is also the Process Center URL to connect to. The eclipse.ini file is usually located in the root folder of the BPM software (e.g. c:\IBM\ProcessDesigner\v8.5\eclipse.ini if you are running it on windows).

This is what you need to do to switch for another Process Center:
1] find out the IP of your server machine.
1.1] Login to the server where Process Center Server is running.
1.2] use cmd and ipconfig commands to find out the IP;

2] check your hosts config (on windows: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc)
2.1] In order the BPD to work correctly you need to have the following line:

• <the server IP>  ibmbpm

This is how it could look like if you IP would be 192.168.29.131:

• 192.168.29.131        ibmbpm

This tells your system that when you enter "ibmbpm" into a browser, you want to connect to the specified IP.

3] check your eclipse.ini (rather in WordPad instead of notepad)
It should contain the following line:

• -Dcom.ibm.bpm.processcenter.url=https://ibmbpm:9443

This tells the BPD to expect the Process Center on ibmbpm, port 9443. Remember that we have set up "ibmbpm" to be interpreted as the IP of our Process Center Server.

Whomp! thats it. You can now run your BPD with the new Process Center attached.

IBM BPM Adding users

It is always fun when you are getting into a software for the first time ;-). This time it was the IBM Business Process Manager for me.

One of the tasks you'd have on the way is User Management. I was in the middle of my BPD creation willing to test the process via a real user interface. OK, that needs some test user right?

Blind lane

I went to my http://ibmbpm:9443/ProcessCenter -> Admin and saw Manage users window. The feeling was: "yiiippiieee, that was easy!". Not for long :). The thing I did not realize was that you can only add existing users via the ProcessCenter. And so I was digging around in the ProcessCenter for quite a while, trying to find the option for new user adding. Do not do that this way :)

Solution

IBM BPM offers a bunch of portals for various tasks. User management functionality can only be accessed via the ProcessAdmin portal - http://ibmbpm:9443/ProcessAdmin . When you come to this point, it is getting straightforward: User Management -> Add ;-).

Sometimes I'm a newbie! :)

Deploying Bonita on WebSphere (linux) for newbies

Last few days, I have been trying to setup Bonita Open Solution on WebSphere Application Server version 7 on a Linux machine (CentOS6.3). This article describes specifics that you need to keep in mind when being on this track.

Although Bonita team is trying hard to provide with documentation, docs on linking Bonita with WebSphere are missing. After few hours searching I found this tutorial, which was very helpful since I was pretty new to the world of WebSphere and EE applications in general.

The tutorial, however, needs some more steps to be followed, otherwise you get a non working instance of Bonita.

OK, so what I wanted to achieve was: Having the Bonita execution Engine and Bonita User Experience running on the platform of WebSphere. These are the steps that might help you to accomplish the goal:

• Follow he steps of the tutorial mentioned up on the page
• There might be some problems in the course of actions
1. xcmis.war file application is missing in the bundle.
• the .war files are the same for all application servers
• so you can download a different Bonita bundle (like Bonita-Tomcat) and get it from there. You can find it in "BUNDLE_DIR/webapps/xcmis.war". You will use this file to install the xcmis application in WebSphere console.
• !! xcmis.war is not the only file you need to import from the tomcat/jboss bundle. You also need to copy the xcmis conf directory (to be found in "BUNDLE_DIR/external/xcmis". You need to copy this folder to <Websphere_HOME>/external/xcmis on your server.
• After starting bonita.war and xcmis.war applications you will try to access your Bonita User Experience (typically somewhere on localhost:9080/bonita/). This might fail with "Error occured while applying the theme". You might skip this this message with clicking on Use default theme.
• Then, another error appeared. "BonitaInternalException: Bonita Error: bai_APII_2"
• This may have two reasons:
1. the WAS_INSTALL_ROOT environment variable is missing
• to check that go on command line and write 'set | grep WAS_INSTALL_ROOT"
• if an empty line is returned, the variable is missing
• to fix this:
•  make a file in /etc/profile.d/bonita.sh (as root)
• put these lines into the file: 
• WAS_INSTALL_ROOT=<path_to_your_install_root>
• export WAS_INSTALL_ROOT
2. there is a wrong \ sign in the tutorial
• You can avoid this error if you got to WebSphere -> Servers -> Enterprise Application Server -> server1 -> Java and processes -> Process definitions -> Java Virtual Machine and  edit the JVM arguments field the following way:
• change the beginning of the line from "-DBONITA_HOME=${WAS_INSTALL_ROOT}\bonita" to "-DBONITA_HOME=${WAS_INSTALL_ROOT}/bonita" (backslash to slash change)
• Restart the server
• Reload Bonita User Experience.
• You may get "Unable to login. Check your username and password" after entering default (admin/bpm) credentials.
• When you the check the server log in <WAS_INSTALL_ROOT>/AppServer/profiles/AppServer01/logs/server1/SystemOut.log, you may find "No LoginModules configured for BonitaAuth" error message
• The  reason is WebSphere cannot load the external/security/jaas-standard.cfg file
• You need to add this line to WebSphere JVM arguments: "-Djava.security.auth.login.config="<WAS install folder>/external/security/jaas-standard.cfg"
• restart websphere
• Note: WebSphere also cannot interpret /* comments in config files. Please check if there are no /* comments in yout jaas-standard.cfg file. If yes, simply remove them. Otherwise you will get another error in the websphere SystemOut.log
• restart the server.
• now the bonita user experience should work fine on localhost:9080