Connectiong to the Stuio engine

Question

Hi,
1.
Is it possible to connect to the embedded ALBPM tudio engine from external program. I have tried to use the following code,
<pre>Properties papiProperties = new Properties();
papiProperties.setProperty(ProcessService.DIRECTORY_PROPERTIES_URL,
"project://localhost:0/path=C%3A%5Cbea%5Calbpm5.71%5Cstudio%5Csamples%5CFeatures%5CLibrary_Components%5CCompLIB.fpr,project=CompLIB");
papiProperties.setProperty(ProcessService.WORKING_FOLDER, "../tmp");
papiProperties.setProperty(ProcessService.INSTANCES_CACHE_SIZE, "500");
ProcessService processService = ProcessService.create(papiProperties); // exception here</pre>
...but I get the following exception:
<pre>fuego.papi.CommunicationException: A communication error occurred. Try again.</pre>
2. Is there a way to obtain the ProcessServiceSession from FBL code (inside BPM method). I would like to test calls to prepareExternalActivity/CommitExternalActivity. Is there any other way to do it from BPL?
Thanks,
Matej

Answer 1

Hi Matej,
If you have to use PAPI one solution is to work against an Enterprise engine and improve the efficiency by automating the deployment to the engine using the ALBPM Ant tasks.
It possible for multiple developers to use the same Enterprise installation - but you have to hack the install a bit. Particularly if you have a shared development box where you want to run the engines - this is made more difficult as there is no ant task to change the engine port - but it's possible to work around this limitation.
So it's probably easier for each developer to have their own Enterprise install.
If you're interested in following this approach I would recommend working against the Standalone engine rather than the J2EE engine. The Standalone is a bit more predictable when it comes to deployment. At least it is in 5.5.
From a developer's perspective the experience is a lot more usable - you can modify the project in Studio then switch to a unix (or dos) terminal and do something like :
ant deploy test
And the scripts will take care of deployment and execute the tests.
You can also use the Ant tasks to automate the creation of the Directory and Engine.
Cheers,
Tim