Any Possibilities to Customize Oracle 11g BPM Worklist

Question

Hi all,
My Requirement is to Customize the Oracle 11g BPM WorkList App. I realise that Oracle no longer provide the code for the worklist app like in 10g and i don't want to write a custom worklist app.
If Possible what will be the procedure actually to follow, If anybody could help me to make it possible it would be a great help.
What we're trying to do is to see if we can block some options on the screens. So we do not need all of the enhanced functionality.
Renuka

Answer 1

Hi Ashif
1. The source code for SOA 11g is NOT available. You cannot customize any files and redploy directly. The main difference for 10g and 11g is, earlier SOA 10g is on Oracle App Server, so not sure how they deployed and how they exposed the source code in the Expanded folder structure for each WAR file like Workspace etc.
But for SOA 11g, it is on Weblogic App Server. All the SOA modules are deployed as EARs, WARs, JARs. So all the source .java files are compiled inside JARs and most of the jsps and serverlets are compiled as .class files inside WARs. Some people do go to soa domain/servers/soa_server/tmp folder and try to modify files there after they are deployed. This is totally not recommended and not supported also. When any soa module is deployed, it goes into dynamically generated weirdly named folder structure and puts all files there. Its not worth to modify there.
Also in SOA 10g, there was like a workspace.properties file directly accessible. But in SOA 11g, now this file is deep inside in one JAR/WAR file which is inside another EAR file. Now some people do extract this JAR from EAR. And from JAR, extract the .properties file. Update the file manually. Put modified file in JAR. Put this updated JAR in EAR. Redploy EAR. This is OK approach, but still not recommended. Because when you apply any patch or upgrade soa env, this EAR will be overwritten. So you had to redo all the steps again.
For Workspace/Worklist customizations, Oracle has some good features in SOA 11.5 + FP (Feature Packe). Only if you apply FP, you will get these features. Since it is very common usecase, for customizations, Oracle is working hard in new releases to give more flexibility.
Also, SOA 11g has very good APIs exposed and good number of call back handlers like ITaskValidationCallback etc etc. You can pretty much control most of the things when a Task is worked on like set/update Payload manually, control task assignment/validation etc using Java code etc. So you can use these approaches also to customize. Say if you want to narrow down list of users who can work on a Task, you can do this.
Also there is something called Flex Fields and Custom Views which come very handy to expose custom search results to different users/groups etc.
Since you are above to migrate to SOA 11.5, first apply Feature Pack (FP) to SOA 11.5 and then migrate your old app.
Thanks
Ravi Jegga