Why Dev Guide says "create a separate project for each ADF task flow ..."

Question

Hi,
We have a BPM process application which is having a few human tasks. The form for each of the human tasks is similar. We’d like to be able to share some page fragments or code between them and create single web application to handle all the human tasks for this BPM process application. Then I found the following in the Oracle document “Developer’s Guide for Oracle SOA Suite 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.4.0)”:
“If the SOA composite contains multiple human tasks, create a separate project for each ADF task flow associated with each human task.”
I wonder if we have to do that and if so, what is the reason.
Do you have any clue? Please help.
Thanks a lot,
Helen

Answer 1

Hi Helen
1. I do not know the reason why they mentioned like separate project for each human task. NO, this is not required and we can have just one UI Project like MyTaskForms and have all the JSPs in this same project for each Human Task.
2. On our side, we have like 10 Human Tasks, all using the same Payload. So we have 10 .task file. For the very first .task file, we used Auto Generate Project and gave project name like OurAppTaskForms. The reason we did this is, so that it adds all the required dependent libraries, tag libs etc properly. For all remaining 9 .tasks file, we did NOT use auto generate. Instead we used standard New -> JSF From Human Task and select one task at a time and follow the steps. These steps are covered in the online documentation. At the end in our BPM App, we have just one UI Project with all the 10 screens.
3. ALSO, all the 10 screens have some common data. This we put in a reusable JSF Fragment page. And associated a custom Managed Bean for this to set and get values from this fragment and also some Actions for some buttons in the JSF. Then we included this JSF in each taskform jsf file, uisng the include tag. We added this include tag, somewhere in the top. So all screens share common jsf fragment page.
4. We can refine the above stuff further. As per above, we still have 10 JSF screens for each one of the 10 .tasks. Ofcourse all these 10 jsf have same common jsf fragment. BUT instead of 10 individual jsf screens, we can have only ONE Jsf screen also. Refer online docs for the details. The challenging part is, since we have only one jsf, there may be some bussiness stuff, validatoin stuff to take care of in custom ValidationCallback Handler classes. Say for Task1, we had to show some buttons, but NOT for Task2. So we had to handle this logic. Also in validation call back, we can always get each Tasks, title also. So we can workaround this issue also. We are in the process of doing this right now. But first 3, we already did and they are working fine.
My personal suggestion is first go with single jsf fragment and include in all tasks jsp files. Any changes to common elements need to make only in one place i.e fragment page.
Thanks
Ravi Jegga