Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Process Automation (OPA) is a relatively new service that provides an easy way to define and automate complex business processes that involve multiple stages and human interactions. In the latest release of Visual Builder we added integration with the process automation service to make it simpler for you to initiate and interact with processes in your application. For Process Automation customers this integration offers an easy way to create custom UIs for initiating processes including the ability to leverage the Redwood UI templates.
Process Automation Backend
They key new functionality is the ability to define a new backend of type "Process Automation" (the backend might already be there for you if you have an instance of Oracle Integration with both VB and OPA turned on). You get all the benefits of backends including the ability to switch services based on the specific deployment. A service catalog then simplifies locating applications and processes directly in the OPA instance and adding them to your VB app. As far as security, VB supports identity propagation between the services using OAuth 2 User Assertion. (Fixed user credentials are another option). See our documentation for the settings needed.
We leverage the Open API spec provided from OPA to automate the definition of the payloads and response loads from the services (including support for dynamic info fetching).
Once you add a process instance to your application, VB defines the endpoints that will let you start and update a process, as well as the ability to query processes instances and get specific process information.
Easy UI Binding
Once you define a connection to a specific process, you can leverage the data palette in the UI designer to create pages that initiate a process, retrieve a list of processes or info on a specific process, and even update a process. VB creates the UI components and the action chains needed to work with OPA.
In the demo below we show the basic steps for creating a simple UI that invokes a specific process, get you a report on the status of instances of processes, and even drill down to further info on a specific process.