This section describes how to set up a worklist for a group of users. It explains
how you can customize the look and feel of the Web client by adding a custom
Viewer. This GroupWorkListViewer
shows how to take advantage of the built-in
commands and how to use Java Server Pages (JSPs) to create response pages.
The tutorial also adds a new queryGroupWorkItems
command by implementing
a user-defined CommandHandler.
In addition, you can learn how you can use the existing WebClient.properties
file to store the properties for your Web client extensions. Because it is not
only configuring the sample but also programming code, the sections for setting
up a group are also called tutorial.
The group worklist is designed as follows: It is assumed that there
is a so-called logical Workflow user, called GROUP. The name and all other settings
can be customized by editing the WebClient.properties
file. The work items of the GROUP user must be handled by serveral other (real)
users. If a user logs on, the worklist for this user is displayed. It contains
only those work items that are assigned to this user. If there are only few
work items available on this worklist, new work items are transferred from the
GROUP worklist. The number of work items to be transferred is controlled by
the grouplist query threshold.
The tutorial for setting up a group worklist provides source code templates for each implementation step together with a possible solution. The resulting group worklist is fully functional for the Web client. The areas in the source code where you need to add your own code are marked with a '@tbd
' tag.
The source files for setting up a worklist are stored in <MQWFDir>/smp/WebClient/groupwl
. Change to this directory and edit the jc.bat
file to point to your MQSeries Workflow installation and to your servlet.jar
file. You can then use the jc.bat
to compile your Web client extensions, for example:
jc step1\GroupWorkListViewer.javaMake sure that you add the
groupwl
directory to the CLASSPATH of your application server, or of the servlet container before testing your Web client extensions.
Coding the group worklist consists of the following steps:
Viewer
that displays a particular worklist.CommandHandler
that provides
a queryGroupWorkItems
command.GroupWorkListHandler
class and use this session to transfer work items to the worklists of other users. If you have imported the group.fdl
without changing it, the default password for the GROUP user is 'password'.GroupWorkList.jsp
file must use the
Catalog class instead of hard-coded strings. The Catalog class handles the problem that the standard Java mechanism only uses the language setting of the server machine. However, in a Web environment, each client can require a different language.For testing purposes, this tutorial contains a test FDL file, which defines a logical user 'GROUP' and a small process with work items that are assigned to GROUP. Import and translate this FDL file which can be found at <MQWFDir>/smp/WebClient/groupwl/group.fdl
. The directory also contains a utility, Group.java
, that allows you to delete the worklists as well as to create or delete instances of the sample GroupWorkList process. If you use Windows as platform, a small batch file
is provided to compile and invoke the Group class. You must edit this group.bat
file to point the CLASSPATH to your MQSeries Workflow installation.
You can use the logging facility for testing purposes. To activate logging,
edit the WebClient.properties
file
and change the line
#Logfile=<MQWFDir>/cfgs/<cfgID>/WebClient/servlet.logto
Logfile=<MQWFDir>/cfgs/<cfgID>/WebClient/servlet.log