Connecting to the Process Engine

This section explains how a to connect to the WebLogic Integration process engine and access the features of the business process management (BPM) framework. It includes the following topics:

Accessing the API Session EJBs

As with any EJB, you must access the BPM API session EJBs using the home and remote interfaces. The following table lists the home and remote interfaces available for this purpose.

To access BPM API session EJBs and their methods, you must perform the following steps:

The following sections describe these steps in detail.

Step 1: Look Up a Session EJB Home Interface in JNDI

The BPM session EJBs are exposed to client applications as part of the WebLogic Server JNDI namespace.

For example, the following method, excerpted from the JSP worklist example, creates an initial context, passing the specified URL, user ID, and password as the context environment.

public Context getInitialContext(
  String user, 
  String password, 
  String url
) throws NamingException 
{
     // Get an InitialContext
     Properties h = new Properties();
     h.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,"weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory");
     h.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, url);
     if (user != null) {
         h.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL, user);
         if (password == null)
           password = "";
     }
         h.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, password);

     return new InitialContext(h);
}

Once the JNDI context is defined, you can use the JNDI context lookup() method to access the session EJB home interface.

For example, to look up the Worklist session EJB home interface, and store the object reference to the worklistHome variable, execute the following statements:

Context context = getInitialContext(url, userId, password);
Object result = context.lookup("com.bea.wlpi.Worklist");
WorklistHome worklistHome =(WorklistHome)
  PortableRemoteObject.narrow(result, WorklistHome.class);

Similarly, to look up the WLPIPrincipal session EJB home interface and store the object reference to the principalHome variable, execute the following statements:

Context context = getInitialContext(url, userId, password);
object result = context.lookup("com.bea.wlpi.WLPIPrincipal");
PrincipalHome prinicipalHome=(PrincipalHome)
  PortableRemoteObject.narrow(result,
  WLPIPrinicipalHome.class);

Step 2: Create a Remote Session Object Using the Home Interface

Once you have a reference to a home interface, you can use the home interface object create() method to access a remote session object (EJBObject).

For example, to create an EJBObject for the Worklist session EJB and store the object reference to the worklist variable, execute the following statement:

Worklist worklist = worklistHome.create();

Similarly, to create an EJBObject for the WLPIPrincipal session EJB and store the object reference to the principal variable, execute the following statement:

WLPIPrincipal wlpiprincipal = principalHome.create();

Using the Convenience Methods to Access EJBs

The com.bea.wlpi.client.common.WLPI class provides a set of convenience methods for accessing session EJBs. The following table summarizes these methods.