Recently, we pushed new features on Business Central added by Foundation Team. Those features are available soon at 7.39 release. This post will do a quick overview of those. I hope you guys enjoy it! Improvements on Business-Central REST API adding the groups/roles operations available in the UI We included in our REST API most of theRead more →

Recently, we pushed new features on Business Central added by Foundation Team. Those features are available soon at 7.39 release. This post will do a quick overview of those. I hope you guys enjoy it!

Improvements on Business-Central REST API adding the groups/roles operations available in the UI

We included in our REST API most of the groups and roles operations available in the Business Central UI, including:

Groups

• New group;
• Delete group;
• List groups;
• Update group permissions;

Roles

• List roles;
• Update roles permissions

See more details on the full blog post.

Decoupling BC File System from JGIT

In the last few months, in order to remove explicit jGit dependencies in Business Central code, we refactored Business Central File allowing users to implement new file system providers.

It is true that we still depend on jGit on many Business Central features (like Collaboration), but this change allowed us to use Kubernetes ConfigMaps to store basic information just using our Java Nio2 library.

This enables Business Central Monitoring to use Kubernetes based cloud providers as a file system, storing all Monitoring information in ConfigMaps without relying on persistent volumes.

Description when creating new Space using Business Central

Now, when you create a new space in Business Central Central via UI or REST API, it’s possible to define not only Space name but also its description.

Other bug fixes and improvements:

We also fixed several bugs and did some performance improvements on Business central:

• AF-2434 Prevent system repositories from receiving the default post-commit hook
• RHPAM-2718 Dropdown with branches is missing in the branch management
• RHPAM-2748 Update locale selection drop-down to include only the supported languages for RHDM and RHPAM
• RHPAM-2708 RHPAM 7.x Business Central latency correlated with the number of groups memberships
• AF-2446 Dashbuilder Map Displayer support latitude, longitude
• AF-2514 Execution Server UI breaks if connected to a KIE Server that has a Container deployed that its jar is not on BC internal Maven repo
• RHPAM-2674 Exception thrown when a test scenario containing a tag is renamed without saving
• AF-2432 Restoring an old asset version doesn’t work outside the master branch

Thank you to everyone involved!

I would like to thank everyone involved with this release, from the awesome Foundation Team Engineers to the lifesavers QEs and all the UX people that help us make our work look awesome!

Last month, our team released a new import piece of our tool belt, the Business Modeler Desktop. This modeler is a multi-platform standalone application that enables you to quickly create and edit DMN and BPMN assets on your Desktop. This post will do a quick overview of this cool new tool. I hope you guys enjoy it!Read more →

Last month, our team released a new import piece of our tool belt, the Business Modeler Desktop. This modeler is a multi-platform standalone application that enables you to quickly create and edit DMN and BPMN assets on your Desktop.

This post will do a quick overview of this cool new tool. I hope you guys enjoy it!

DMN and BPMN Modeler

From the initial screen, you will be able to create new BPMN workflows and DMN Decision Models or use our samples as a starting point to your models!

We also provide a quick way to filter your recent files and see previews of your diagrams.

Importing code to Business Modeler

Another cool feature of Business Modeler is the ability to import BPMN or DMN models via URL. For instance, you can import this model from our examples:

Remember to make sure that your models on the URL are text content. If you are using Github, you need to provide the raw link of the desired model. The same applies to Dropbox Links (example).

Learn More

If you are new to BPMN or DMN or maybe want to become an expert, you can go to our ‘Learn More’ section and check useful links for our tutorials, highlighting our “Learn DMN in 15 minutes” web site.

Thank you to everyone involved!

I want to thank everyone involved with this release from the awesome KIE Tooling Team Engineers to the lifesavers QEs and the UX people that help us look awesome!

Business Modeler Desktop Preview Released was originally published in kie-tooling on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last month, we released a new piece of our tooling strategy, the Business Modeler Hub Preview. A single place where you are just one click away from all our tooling channels. The Hub is available on all platforms: Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can also download it via the Business Modeler website. Business Modeler Hub Preview Currently,Read more →

Last month, we released a new piece of our tooling strategy, the Business Modeler Hub Preview. A single place where you are just one click away from all our tooling channels.

The Hub is available on all platforms: Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can also download it via the Business Modeler website.

Business Modeler Hub Preview

Currently, Business Modeler Hub Preview aggregates four tools for your easy access:

• Kogito VS Code extension: where you can automatically install our extension on VS Code and launch it with only two clicks;
• Kogito GitHub extension for Chrome: where you can install the Kogito extension to an existing version of Chrome;
• Business Modeler Desktop Preview: where you can launch the desktop version of Business Modeler Preview;
• Business Modeler Preview: where you can quickly go to the Online Modeler Preview site.

Thank you to everyone involved!

I want to thank everyone involved with this new tool, from the KIE Tooling Team Engineers to the lifesavers QEs and the UX people that help us look awesome!

What is new on Business Central, from Foundation Team perspective — March 2020 Recently, we pushed a lot of cool new features on Business Central added by Foundation Team. Those features are available soon at 7.34 release. This post will do a quick overview of those. I hope you guys enjoy it! Branch support on REST APIs Users can leverage branchRead more →

What is new on Business Central, from Foundation Team perspective — March 2020

Recently, we pushed a lot of cool new features on Business Central added by Foundation Team. Those features are available soon at 7.34 release.

This post will do a quick overview of those. I hope you guys enjoy it!

Branch support on REST APIs

Users can leverage branch support on the REST API.

See more details on the full blog post.

Maven archetype support

Users can create projects based on templates.

See more details on the full blog post.

Create projects from empty repositories

Users can import an empty repository from a git provider service

See more details on the full blog post.

Squash Commits on a Change request

Users can choose to squash commits when merging a change request

See more details on the full blog post.

Other bug fixes and improvements:

We also fixed several bugs and improved Business Central on some specific scenarios:

• JBPM-8826 — Forms — 10 Listeners get added each time a form is rendered
• AF-2232 IllegalStateException displayed briefly in the UI when logging out from business-central
• AF-2397 — Deletion of group from Business Central UI does not remove group from the security-policy.properties file
• AF-2396 — Rest request to list spaces fails when RHPAM is integrated with RHSSO using SAML protocol
• JBPM-8851 — Rename an asset change the quantity of assets returned by a search
• AF-2424 Issue with the group permissions for the “Pages”
• AF-2341 — Not able to restore files if the file uses a tag
• AF-2395 -Unexpected error on Project level while launching test on cloned via REST project
• AF-1395 — The new Form modeler editor is not locked when it is edited
• AF-574 — [Layout editor] Components disappear after moving
• AF-903 — [Settings] Made changes are no longer displayed after saving
• AF-2404 — Package dropdown button is not visible (slowly appears) when creating an asset

Thank you to everyone involved!

I would like to thank everyone involved with this release, from the awesome Foundation Team Engineers, to the lifesavers QEs and all the UX people that help us make our work look awesome!

What a great year! I’m really proud of everything that our team delivered in 2019. Without a shadow of a doubt, this was the most exciting year of our team. Our team’s primary focus was on Business Central and Kogito Tooling. First of all, I would like to congrats all the engineering team for the excellentRead more →

What a great year! I’m really proud of everything that our team delivered in 2019. Without a shadow of a doubt, this was the most exciting year of our team. Our team’s primary focus was on Business Central and Kogito Tooling.

First of all, I would like to congrats all the engineering team for the excellent work, including Adriel 🇦🇷, Paulo 🇧🇷, Tiago 🇧🇷, Pere 🇪🇸, William 🇧🇷, Gabriel 🇧🇷, Guilherme 🇧🇷, Rishiraj 🇮🇳 , and Abhishek🇮🇳, with all the support from our manager David 🇪🇸, our Product Owner Myriam 🇲🇽 and our architect Alex 🇧🇷.

All this work is only possible because we collaborate with an impressive QE Team (Tomas 🇨🇿, Barbora 🇸🇰, Dominik 🇸🇰, and Jakub 🇨🇿), and an awesome UXD Team (Liz 🇺🇸, Sarah 🇺🇸, Kyle 🇺🇸 , Amy 🇺🇸 , SJ Clark🇺🇸 and Brian 🇺🇸). A huge thanks to everyone involved with foundation work.

Let’s do a retrospective of what our team delivered in 2019 on two major areas: Business Central and Kogito Tooling. I hope you guys enjoy it!

Kogito Tooling

Kogito, the newest project from the KIE group, is cloud-native business automation for building intelligent applications, backed by battle-tested capabilities.

Kogito is designed from the ground up to run at scale on the cloud. By taking advantage of the latest technologies (Quarkus, Knative, etc.), you get amazingly fast boot times and instant scaling on orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.

The project also goes beyond technology, and it also provides a focus on the domain. It replaces traditional generic API by a domain-based API, avoiding unnecessary abstraction leaks of the underline tools used.

Kogito focuses on developers, and this is where the BPMN Extension for VSCode plays an important role. Additional to the extension, Kogito also provides:

Tooling embeddable wherever you need it

• Code generation taking care of 80% of the work;
• Flexibility to customize, only use what you need;
• Simplified local development with live reload.

To learn more about Kogito, please visit the kogito.kie.org website.

In the second semester of 2019, our team was responsible for building the infrastructure of the kogito tooling.

We had a remarkable year for the kogito tooling! I’m proud of the excellent work and innovation that we were able to accomplish on this initiative. Let’s take a look:

BPMN/DMN VSCode Extension

This release in September marked the first piece of the new tooling infrastructure for the Kie Group Team. With VSCode support, our goal was to streamline the dev workflow of our platform, making it easy for developers to create BPMN diagrams and push them straight to kogito runtimes.

Take a look at the full blog post.

Github Chrome Extension

In October, we released our GitHub Chrome Extension. With this new tool, users are able not just to edit but also visualize DMN/BPMN diagrams — which is especially cool on Pull Request reviews.

See the original blog post, and the posts describing the cool improvements [1] [2] that we launched in December:

Online Editor

In December, we launched the first alpha release of our brand new Kogito Online Editor. It can be accessed here: http://kiegroup.github.io/kogito-online.

The Kogito Online Editor provides a simple way to edit DMN and BPMN files directly on your browser. You can create a file from scratch or upload an existing one from your device.

Kogito Tooling Resource Content API

In December, we also launched Resource Content API, a common API able to fetch content across different Channels(VSCode/Chrome/Online), an example of this need is the DMN Editor that imports another DMN model. Another example is a Runtime Process Admin UI that needs access to the Process Definition (the content of a BPMN file). See the full blog post for details.

That is it for the Kogito Tooling side! Let’s take a look at what we achieved on Business Central?

Business Central

KIE (Knowledge Is Everything) is an umbrella brand offering a complete portfolio of solutions for business automation. It contains a group of related projects, including Drools (business rule management system), jBPM (a flexible Business Process Management Suite), and OptaPlanner (constraint solver).

The web tooling to interface and integrate with those projects is called Business Central: a web UI to author, manage and track business rules and processes.

Let’s take a look at what our team delivered in this area.

High Availability

Some weeks ago, KIE Foundation Team achieved a significant milestone: Build a cloud friendly-production-ready HA infrastructure for jBPM, Drools, and Optaplanner tooling (Business Central).

This journey, targeting a fail safe infrastructure of Business Central, required a refactoring and redesign of some pieces of our codebase, with significant changes on the filesystem, index engine, distribution of events, and on Business Central UI. Still, in the end, we are delighted with the result, seeing Business Central running smoothly on a clustered environment (especially on OpenShift). Take a look at the full blog post.

Streamline the Dev Workflow on Business Central

Based on feedback from our community, one of our main goals in BC this year was to enhance the developer workflow for rules/BPM. In that area we delivered:

Git Hooks Samples

Some cool examples to make it easier for you to automate git workflows via git hooks. You should take it a look.

Git Hooks Execution Feedback Messages

Based on your feedback on our git hooks integration, we included a way to customize your messages on script execution.

Business Central now provides a mechanism to enable users getting feedback about the git hooks execution using customized messages based on the hook exit code.

SSH Keystore

To provide better automation on our platform, we delivered in Business Central an SSH Keystore. This means that users can store their public keys inside the workbench and use them to authenticate their automation scripts via ssh keys.

Contributors on Business Central

We’ve created three roles integrated directly into spaces and projects (Contributor/Admin/Owner). These roles allow you to fine-tune the permissions on your spaces and projects, and soon this will deprecate Security Permissions for spaces and projects. Take a look at the full blog post.

Role-Based Access Control for Branches

Built upon Contributors feature, we are proud to release role-based access branches on Business Central.

With this new feature, we provided a new UI on project settings to allow users to restrict the access for a target branch for a specific collaborator type. This is pretty useful for instance when you want to freeze a release branch for some roles. Take a look at the demo:

Import specific branches on Business Central

Sometimes you don’t want to import all the branches from your repo. We made it possible to import just some specific branches from your repo.

Speed up the Developer Workflow

As I already mentioned, one of our goals was to enhance the developer workflow for rules/BPM. And we included on BC two things that we believe will be game-changers for those developers who work with Business Central on a daily basis.

The first feature was the ‘Build and Install’ button on authoring. This allows users to do a build on their projects without the need for a deploy.

The second valuable addition was that we created two new Decision/Process Server Modes. DEVELOPMENT (the new default) and PRODUCTION that (Blocks “-SNAPSHOT” deployment).

These changes will allow users to quickly build, deploy our projects, making it easier (and saving many clicks) to test their changes on Kie Server while we can preserve the production consistency. First, let’s take a look at our production mode.

Workspace collaboration via change requests

We also included a cool new feature targeting business central collaboration: Change Requests support between Business Central branches.

This new workflow allows users to submit their changes for approval from one branch to another, as well as the ability to review the changes prior to the integration.

See details about this feature on this post and a sneak peek on this video:

Form modeler support for class models from external dependencies

We created a way to allow users to load models from external dependencies on forms. This allows us to generate forms for processes that use classes from external dependencies (not created on the same project with Data Modeler but that are added as dependencies of the project).

Upload of multiple documents for human task forms

We created in the forms designer a widget called “Document Collection”. It enables you to upload multiple documents to a process or task form. You can also use the “Document Collection” widget for process or task forms that have a variable with the type `org.jbpm.document.DocumentCollection`. Additionally, it also supports the legacy type `org.jbpm.document.Documents`.

Importing and exporting Dashbuilder data

On Business Central 7.25 (August) 7.25 we added a feature that allows users to import and export all data related to Dashbuilder: Datasets, Perspectives, and Navigation.

CSS Editor on Form Builder

We also created a cool new CSS Editor on our Form Builder. Take a look on your demo:

React components in Red Hat Business Central

We also created a way to write Business Central components based on React. Take a look at the full blog post.

Business Central Brand Consolidation

To consolidate and promote better our technology stack, since 7.18 version we consolidated and rebranded the workbenches to a single distribution called to Business Central (accessible via /business-central). Take a look at this post to do a deep dive on this migration.

Offline Charts

The Dashbuilder default chart implementation was replaced from Google Charts to C3.js. The main reason behind this move is to allow our users to use Business Central in an offline environment (Google Charts requires internet connection).

UX improvements

With the excellent collaboration from the UX team, we are able to improve a lot of Business Central UX. Some highlights:

AF-2176 — Error messages need to be able to be copied

In the past, error messages often overrun the size of the field on the bottom of the web page. The only way to read them was hovering over the field and there was no way to copy the text of a message. We fixed this formatting the error message and also adding a copy button that copies all the errors on CSV format.

AF-2244 — UX support/guidance after new deployment

After deploying a new project, the user is now able to ‘View deployment details’ with a useful link.

AF-2151 — Modify asset Save button behavior and presentation

Instead of asking the user every time to add a comment to the file commit on the Save action, we now provide a split button with the primary (default) option being simply Save the file, with no dialog presented before saving — streamlining the dev workflow.

If the user wants to comment on the save operation, he/she can still rely on our new option “Save with comments”, that will be presented with a dialog asking for the file save the comment.

AF-2214 — User confirmation when closing the workbench with unsaved stuff

If the user had unsaved changes and closed the browser, then they would lose all changes without being warned about it. Thus, as a last resort, after this PR the browser will ask the user for confirmation when closing the tab, closing the browser or refreshing the page. (Currently, this functionality is only supported on Google Chrome).

AF-2215 — When you add or remove a field from the form, it scrolls up.

This fixes the issue that every time that you added or removed a field from the forms, it would scroll to the top. Now we keep the form at the same position after every edit.

AF-2216 If I shutdown the server, the Web UI just spins and spins w/o an error message

After this PR, if the server is shutdown, we show an appropriated pop up saying that the server is being shut down, instead of a generic error message.

AF-2177 — Add Project button should also allow importing

If the URL has leading or trailing spaces when importing a git project, the import fails. Field validation should handle this automatically for the user.

Improvement in generic error dialogues

We added a bunch of new features to improve generic error dialogues in business central. See a full blog post about it.

Thank you to everyone involved!

I would like to thank everyone involved in this remarkable year, from the awesome Foundation Team Engineers, to the lifesavers QEs, Docs, and to all the UX people that help us make our work look fantastic!

We are happy to announce a fresh new Kogito Tooling release that includes a major milestone for our team — the DMN support for VSCode and GitHub Chrome extension. We also added some important enhancements to our GitHub Chrome Extension. Now users will be able to not just edit but also visualize DMN/BPMN diagrams — what is especially coolRead more →

We are happy to announce a fresh new Kogito Tooling release that includes a major milestone for our team — the DMN support for VSCode and GitHub Chrome extension.

We also added some important enhancements to our GitHub Chrome Extension. Now users will be able to not just edit but also visualize DMN/BPMN diagrams — what is especially cool on Pull Request reviews.

First, as always, let’s take a look at the demo! Please pay special attention to the pull request workflow.

Awesome isn’t it? Alex Porcelli wrote a detailed post about how this feature is a game changer to the BPMN/DMN developer workflow. Take a look on his blog.

Decision Model and Notation Support

With a great collaboration of the Drools Tooling team (with highlights for the impressive work of Michael Anstis, Gabriele Cardosi and Guilherme Carreiro Gomes) we reached a major milestone on Kogito tooling. Now you will be able to create your DMN files inside your VSCode and on GitHub Chrome Extension.

Chrome Extension New Features

As promised in the last post, we also added on this release two new major improvements on our Chrome Extension. The ability to visualize the BPMN/DMN diagram on any repo (not only on editing) and also a great integration to the GitHub PR review mechanism.

You are now able to not only visualize the current diagram but if you click on the original button, you will be able to see the current state of the file in the repository. We hope that this will be helpful to review your models directly on the GitHub Pull Request in the same way you do for any source code.

NOTE: When editing a file directly on GitHub’s interface and committing it, GitHub takes a while to make the new file available on raw.githubusercontent.com. Since that’s where we fetch the files from, you might see outdated versions for a while. Don’t panic! After a few moments the files will be in sync.

But how to install this?

Ok, this is cool but how to install it? Look at the instructions on our blog posts: How to setup the extension on Chrome Extension and How to set up the extension on VSCode. Soon we will make this process more straight forward publishing on Chrome and VSCode extension store.

What’s Next

As you may have realised, we have big plans for our kogito tooling. Soon, we will hope to release another game-changing tool for you! Stay tuned!

Are you tired of (impossible) big XML code reviews of BPMN diagrams on GitHub Pull Requests? We know your pain and that is exactly the reason why we just released a new Chrome Extension that allows visualizing and editing BPMN files directly on GitHub’s interface. 🎉 Before diving on details, let’s take a look atRead more →

Are you tired of (impossible) big XML code reviews of BPMN diagrams on GitHub Pull Requests?

We know your pain and that is exactly the reason why we just released a new Chrome Extension that allows visualizing and editing BPMN files directly on GitHub’s interface. 🎉

Before diving on details, let’s take a look at a quick demo of this feature:

Pretty cool isn’t it?

With this chrome extension, our goal is to streamline even more the dev workflow, making Kogito the most developer-friendly business automation platform.

How to set up the extension on Chrome

During this alpha stage, you will have to download the extension from the GitHub releases page and install it manually on Chrome. Soon we will publish this extension on Chrome Web Store, but for now, those are the installation steps:

Features

With the BPMN Github Chrome extension installed, every time that you are editing a BPMN/BPMN2 file, instead of seeing the huge XML file you will be using our BPMN graphical editor. After you modify the file you will be able to commit or send a PR directly from the GitHub interface.

We also provide some advanced features, like full-screen visualization for big diagrams and also you can click on “See as source” to edit the XML manually. You can always go back to the diagram by clicking on “See as diagram”.

What’s Next

We have big plans for our extension, that will include visualizing the BPMN diagram on any repo (not only on editing) and also more integration to PR review mechanism.

Soon we will release a DMN editor extension under the same platform, stay tuned!

Known issues

We are really happy with the results of this alpha release and we want to get the community involved in this as early as possible, that is why we released this with some known issues:

• KOGITO-342 Check why BPMN editor shows error on page closing.
• KOGITO-347 Error logs happening during marshaling
• AF-2167 Native editor key bindings for macOS.

Pull requests, bug reports are more than welcome, this is an ongoing effort of our community!

Take-Aways

As I already said, we are really happy to release this extension. Soon we will provide new editors under this platform! Exciting times ahead!