Does BPM 11.1.1.7 support parameter roles properties in LDAP?

Question

Dear Expert:
           I know the BPM 11.1.1.5 support paramter roles,but it seems we must extent user properties then using these as parameter,I want to know
can I using properties in user's LDAP properties then using as parameter in 11.1.1.7?
          Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Here's a blog post that describes how you can get parametric role functionality in any release of Oracle BPM 11g and I believe is far simpler than the out of the box parametric role functionality:  http://avioconsulting.com/blog/creating-parametric-roles-using-business-rules.
The out of the box official Parametric roles feature came in on a second version of 11.1.1.5 called the PS4 "feature pack".  Unless you have  the 11.1.1.5 feature pack or are on 11.1.1.6 or 11.1.1.7, you won't be able to use the out of the box Parametric role feature.
In 11.1.1.7 (PS6) parametric roles started supporting custom LDAP attributes.  There are a lot of moving parts to getting this to work and it takes quite a bit of configuration from (1) the Enterprise Manager, (2) the Workspace, (3) LDAP administrator perspective, (4) the human task, and (5) the WebLogic Administration Console.  On Enterprise Manager, you're editing the JPS provider in the MBean Browser, editing the “addSearchableUserAttributeMap” operation setting and the "SearchableUserAttributeMap" property.  In the Workspace you're adding the parametric roles based on the custom LDAP attributes,  Each human task has to have its assignment set to use the parametric roles.  Your LDAP administrator needs to create the custom attributes and then assign them to users.  I think it's going to be tough finding an LDAP administrator who is willing to add additional attributes to LDAP and then to assign specific people to use them with various settings.  Once people have been assigned to the various attributes, the LDAP admin would then have to maintain them at the attribute level as well.  Guessing there is a way to do it, but I don't believe it is trivial to determine what people have an LDAP custom user property set to a specific value.  If you're using the embedded LDAP that comes with WebLogic, you'll need to also change the adapters.prop to support searching on custom attributes and the new custom attributes will have to be added to the orderingndex and presenceIndex properties.
As you can probably tell, I'm not a huge fan of the out of the box parametric role feature.  The rules based approach described in the above blog:
Works with any release of 11g,
Uses either LDAP groups or the Application Roles defined in the Workspace for the assignments,
It's easy in LDAP to see who the people are who are assigned to an LDAP group and it's easy to assign people to Application Roles and
It is far easier to configure.