Oracle Process Cloud Service - Consuming ADF BC REST Service in Web Form

With the introduction of Oracle Process Cloud Service (https://cloud.oracle.com/process) there is an option to run your business process in the cloud. You can implement very similar things as it is possible with BPM 12c in JDeveloper, but only in the cloud. There is no option to implement human task UI with ADF, it must be done with Web Forms (light UI forms implementation framework). This is disadvantage, as it will require to externalise complex business logic and access data collections through REST calls, instead of processing it locally in ADF extension. However, this is how it is implemented currently in the BPM cloud version.

This is how it looks - Web Form editor in Process Cloud Service:

You have an option to select specific types from component palette. There are such types as money, email, phone, text. Components are provided with built in validation, checks for valid email address, etc. User who implements a form, needs to drag and drop components one by one (generally it works OK, but sometimes may get stuck and page refresh will be required). Properties section is available to enter details for the selected component.

Cool part about it - we can define business logic rules. For example, to show/hide customer field based on trip type, etc. One of the rules below, shows how REST service can be called inline and REST response is applied for drop-down field. This is pretty simple to fetch data from external REST service and use it for the Web Form component. Just invoke REST service and assign collection to the component supporting array of data:

If REST call requires to pass parameters through URL, this is also possible, see example below - list of cities, based on the selected country in the Web Form:

Web Form works pretty well in Preview mode, it even calls REST services and shows real data. Validation messages for built-in checks are displayed pretty nicely. Here I'm selecting a country from the list populated by REST service:

Based on the selection in the Country drop-down, filtered list for Cities becomes available (another REST call):

Good news - most of the Oracle Process Cloud interface itself is implemented with ADF. Here you can see a section listing all Web Forms available for the current process:

I have implemented REST service for Countries and Cities lists in ADF BC. There are two custom methods in AM implementation, to fetch the data and transform it to the list format:

REST resources are defined through annotations and are configured to produce JSON data, this will allow Oracle Process Cloud to parse such data automatically:

If you are going to check how REST service is implemented in ADF BC, you can run a query in Postman to retrieve a list of all countries from HR schema:

Another query to retrieve a list of cities, by country:

Download sample application, with ADF BC REST service - RestADFBCApp.zip.