Chapter 2. New features

An improved Process Designer interface includes the most common BPMN2 nodes as well as form generation and the ability to export to PNG, PDF, SVG, and BPMN2. The legacy Process Designer is still available for full functionality.

The Page Designer provides integrated monitoring and dashboards. You can use it to create pages and manage the navigation tree. It replaces Dashbuilder.

The Red Hat Process Automation Manager Home page has been redesigned for easier navigation.

A case project is a type of project in Business Central that is configured for case management. Case management is an extension of business process management (BPM) that enables you to handle dynamic and ad hoc activities. It handles one-off situations where the process cannot be predicted in advance. For more information, see Getting started with case management.

You can use Decision Model and Notation (DMN) to model a decision service graphically in a decision requirements diagram (DRD). This diagram traces business decisions from start to finish, with each decision node drawing logic from DMN model decision elements such as decision tables.

The Red Hat implementation of DMN meets the standards of the DMN specification Conformance Level 3. Red Hat Process Automation Manager currently supports DMN version 1.1. For more information about DMN 1.1, see the OMG DMN Specification.

A new dashboard is available for every project listed in the Projects page. The Projects Metrics dashboard displays all of your project contribution metrics in one place. This new dashboard replaces the Contributors page, which was part of the Authoring group.

The Team Metrics dashboard shows all of the project metrics for a team in a single page. This new dashboard replaces the older Contributors page, which was part of the Authoring group.

With Form Modeler, you can generate forms for data objects, task forms, and process start forms without writing code. Form Modeler includes a widget library for binding multiple data types and a callback mechanism to send notifications when form values change. Form Modeler uses bean-based validation and supports binding form fields to static or dynamic models.

The following columns have been added to the corresponding pages:

You can now search for specific data by using the Search tab on the Jobs, Process Instances, Task Administration, and Execution Errors pages.

The former Task List page has been divided into the Task Inbox and Task Administration pages. The Task Inbox page is used by task operators to work with their assigned (or potentially assigned) tasks. The Task Administration page is used by administrators to manage tasks assigned to other users. This page is only available for users with admin or process-admin roles. It is similar to the Admin filter tab on the former Task List page.

High availability and clustering for Business Central is now configured with JMS and NFS storage.

Red Hat Process Automation Manager settings allow you to enable the CMS page.

While running a process instance or a job, the system now detects and stores execution errors such as exceptions after the maximum number of retries has been exceeded.

The process instance list includes a new column that displays the number of errors per process instance which are not marked as acknowledged.

The Execution Errors page lists any errors that occur during process instances or executor service jobs on a Process Server. Use this page to help troubleshoot issues. It is visible to users with the admin and process-admin roles.

The deployment descriptor designer in Business Central has been improved to validate data entered for the following components:

The deployment descriptor designer performs the validation when a build is invoked or manually when a user clicks Validate.

The Job creation interface has been modified to enable you to start the job immediately or schedule it to be executed later.

You can use the Employee Roster and Case Management application templates.

Property reactivity is enabled by default in Drools 7.0. If you expect property reactivity to be enabled only for classes annotated with @PropertyReactive, add the following configuration to the kmodule.xml file:

<configuration>
  <property key="drools.propertySpecific" value="ALLOWED"/>
</configuration>

To help users build custom service tasks (work items), Red Hat Process Automation Manager comes with the Work Item archetype that generates the majority of items required to build a custom service task. The archetype includes the following components:

The Maven assembly (zip) packages everything at build time so the package can be consumed by the Service Repository and therefore be used from within the Web Designer.

A process administration API and task administration API have been introduced to simplify some of the more complex administrator use cases. You can use the process administration API to perform the following tasks:

You can use the task administration API to perform the following tasks:

When tasks are assigned to a group of users, you can use pluggable task assignment strategies to automatically assign tasks to a suitable individual immediately. This enables more efficient task allocation, based on all properties associated with the task. For example, such as potential owners and task priority but also task data that includes information such as geography, required skills, and so on. You can use business rules to define the assignment logic, making it easy to customize this to your needs.

The business rule task has been enhanced to limit the number of fired rules. This avoids situations where rules run into an infinite loop and make the server completely unresponsive. The default fire limit is 10000.

Use one of the following methods to configure the fire limit:

If the fire rule limit is reached, the service throws an exception to indicate that the enviroment might be unstable.

Initial integration with NoSQL has been introduced. This is based on additional emitters that can be implemented to receive notifications when the process engine executes processes. This enables users to plug in their own emitters that will be responsible for sending data to external data stores. Note that this is an integration and not a replacement of the persistence layer of jBPM.

The Quartz scheduler service has been improved to fetch jobs only for deployments (KIE containers) that are currently available in the running system.

You can now track your processes, the activities in your processes, and cases by service level agreement (SLA) due date.

You can now forward and reassign a task to groups.

You can use the AsyncMode environment variable to set all tasks to be asynchronous by default.

You can configure Process Server to run in managed or unmanaged mode. If Process Server is unmanaged, you must manually create and maintain containers. If Process Server is managed, the Process Automation Manager controller manages the Process Server configuration and you interact with the controller to create and maintain containers.

The Process Automation Manager controller is integrated with Business Central. If you install Business Central, use the Execution Server page to create and maintain containers. However, if you do not install Business Central, you can install the headless Process Automation Manager controller and use the REST API or the Process Server Java Client API to interact with it.

Business Central now delegates all of its requests to the Process Server. The main advantage is that Business Central can now be used to monitor any set of Process Servers. By linking the Process Server to Business Central, the process and task monitoring interfaces in Business Central can now connect to this Process Server and show all relevant information. When multiple independent Process Servers are used, you can either connect to a specific one or use the smart router to aggregate information across multiple servers.

UserTaskService updates task metadata and variables in a single operation. This feature is available through KIE Server REST and JMS API.

Smart router (also known as the KIE server router) includes the following enhancements:

You can now use aliases instead of container IDs in the remote REST APIs of the execution server.

Process Server has been enhanced with additional Maven plugins that enable interaction with the Process Server and the Process Automation Manager controller REST API directly from within a build. This interaction facilitates easier integration with CI/CD pipelines when building KJars so they can be directly deployed to the execution environment (both managed and unmanaged Process Server).

OOPath, which has syntax similar to XPath used for rule constraints, is now supported.

Support for container locators (sometimes referred to as aliases) and polices is available.

API reference documentation is available in Swagger, at localhost:8080/kie-server/docs.

To pin down an assignment and force Red Hat Business Optimizer to leave it untouched, add the @PlanningPin annotation on a planning entity’s boolean property and make it true for those entities that are immovable.

You can assign each conference talk to a time slot and a room. Timeslots can overlap. Save data in or extract data from an *.xlsx file that can be edited with LibreOffice or Microsof Excel.

Red Hat Business Optimizer now integrates with the guided decision tables designer. You can modify the score with built-in Red Hat Business Optimizer actions that can be accessed in the Action BRL fragment column type. The Workbench examples now include the Dinner Party project, which uses a guided decision table to define score constraints.

Red Hat Business Optimizer now integrates with the guided rule designer. You can modify the score with a built-in Red Hat Business Optimizer action.

Process Server now has an interface that enables you to update a problem data set while the solver is running. Use the Java client or REST interface to submit your ProblemFactChange implementations.

Red Hat Business Optimizer now has support for solving a single data set by partitioning across multiple threads. This enhancement makes use of multiple CPU cores for a single problem. Partitioned search can implement geo-fencing for Vehicle Routing use cases.

You no longer need to define the score type in the solver configuration. Red Hat Business Optimizer now determines it automatically from the domain model.

The Red Hat Business Optimizer designer now supports adding all termination types, including composite termination. The Phase configuration section enables you to tweak Construction Heuristic settings and select the Local Search algorithm to optimize your planning problem.

The Red Hat Business Optimizer domain designer can now specify a planning entity difficulty. Navigate through the object hierarchy and define the sorting attributes. Several construction heuristic algorithms use this information to construct a better initial solution.

The Red Hat Business Optimizer Planner Server now supports real-time planning.