The Process Manager Web Service

The Process Manager Web services are used to access the Process Manager.

The Process Manager Web Service API (PMService) in CA Workflow r1 was written as a thin layer over the internal process manager APIs, using the same HTTP RPC method as the IDE client. The API would then convert the Java objects returned by the RPC methods to XML and return the XML as a SOAP string. It was up to the client to parse these XML strings and no schema was provided for the XML types.

The new Process Manager Web Service API (PMService2) seeks to improve the original PMService in the following areas:

• Instead of returning XML as strings, the Process Manager Web Service API uses the built-in serializers provided with Apache Axis, as well as custom serializers, to return data as complex types defined in the WSDL instead of free-form XML.
• Since the Web Service API and process manager reside inside the same context in the J2EE application server, the HTTP calls will be replaced with direct calls to the ProcessManagerServer in the pm context.

A side effect of moving away from the HTTP API is that Axis must be run inside an HTTP session managed by the J2EE application server in order for clustering to work properly. This change requires the client support HTTP cookies to maintain a session with the server. Clients that do not support cookies should continue to use the original PMService API delivered with CA Workflow r1.

The old Process Manager Web Service API (PMService) is still supported in CA Workflow r1.1.

The sections that follow provide additional details and describe operations from PMService and PMService2.

This section contains the following topics:

The Process Manager Web Services Facility

Process Manager Web Services Operations (PMService)

Complex Types - Process Manager Web Services

Process Instance Status

Simple Types - Process Manager Web Services

The Process Manager Web Services Facility

To use the Process Manager Web Services Facility, use the WSDL located at http://<servername>:CA Portal/pm/services/pmService2?wsdl (or http://<servername>:CA Portal/pm/services/pmService?wsdl for PMService) with third-party tools to generate subclasses. These classes can then be interfaced with an application written in the appropriate language.

Process Manager Web Services Operations (PMService)

The server exposes its Process Manager interface as a Web service for interaction with third-party components. The Web service exposes management functions for dealing with definitions, activities, instances, server configuration, and so on.

An important change from CA Workflow r1 is that logInToken(String token, String pmurl) and logIn(String username, String password, String pmurl) have been deprecated; they have been replaced with logInPM(String username, String password) and logInTokenPM(String token), which log the user into the local process manager. The old methods will not work correctly when passing in a remote process manager URL.

To log in to a remote process manager, change the port address of your Web services client to that servers' PMService address.

A complete list of operations follows.