OBPM 10gR3 Easter Egg

It’s actually a Christmas Egg, but it makes me smile every year in December. A bit hard to spot and I must admit I thought my icons were corrupt the first time I noticed it.
The small Santa’s hat is what I’m talking about, as you can see in this screenshot:

(Did you notice it!?!?)
If you didn’t, no worries; here it is again: 
Kudos to the OBPM devvers!

Debugging Oracle BPM 10Gr3 Studio

Debugging Oracle BPM has been a bit tedious. One would often start setting logmessages which will clutter your logs when running the project in a production environment (and a performance issue when not needed!)
This post contains several ways of debugging;

  1. Debug in BPM Studio
  2. Debug BPM Methods
  3. logMessage(s) with simple types
  4. logMessage(s) with complex types
As a side note; LogMessages are often abused for debugging, you might consider making project variables if you notice you keep looking in the logs.
A clear distinction for me is that all functional values should be accessible through the WorkSpace and exception handling should also be raised through logmessages.

Debug in BPM Studio:

  1. First toggle a breakpoint in your code. (Right mouse click on the left side of your code)
  2. Then click “Open Debug Dialog” in the menu “Run”:
  3. Create a new “BPM Process Debugger” by clicking on “New launch configuration”
  4. Give the configuration a name
  5. Select the project
  6. Click Apply and then Debug button
  7. Run your project until it reaches your breakpoint:

Debug BPM Methods

  1. Select the BPM Script Launcher and click New Launch Configuration
  2. Choose the project
  3. Type the component name
  4. Choose the method
  5. Click Apply and debug
  6. Remember that the method values needs to be initialized.

logMessage(s) with simple types:

You can log simple types by using the logMessage command:

logMessage("<< [" + process.name + "] [" + Activity.name + "] " + "message received but not for this process\nMessage contents: " + message.textValue, severity : Severity.WARNING);

This would result in a warning log statement with message being displayed.

logMessage(s) with complex types:

A quick way to display complex types is through DynamicXml, which will take bpm variables (complex & simple).

logMessage("complexTypeVariable:\n" + DynamicXml.createXmlTextFor(object : complexTypeVariable)

This is an example of the log statement:

complexTypeVariable:
<xobject.Src.Com.Joris.BPM.Types.complexTypeVariable xmlns="http://bea.com/albpm/DynamicXml/version/2.0">
	<firstvalue>123</firstvalue>
	<secondvalue>second</secondvalue>
	<thirdvalue>false</thirdvalue>
</xobject.Src.Com.Joris.BPM.Types.complexTypeVariable>

I’ll expand this post in the future with (Process) Unit tests as well.
Happy debugging!

SWTError with Oracle BPM Studio 10gR3 on Ubuntu

I’ve been busy trying to get my development environment running on Ubuntu 11.04.
The following error pops up while trying to create a presentation for a bpm variable:

XPCOM error -2147467259
org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467259
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.error(Mozilla.java:1296)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.create(Mozilla.java:266)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser.<init>(Browser.java:109)
at fuego.ui.peer.swt.SwtBrowser.createBrowser(SwtBrowser.java:137)
at fuego.ui.peer.swt.SwtBrowser.<init>(SwtBrowser.java:43)
at fuego.ui.peer.swt.SwtFactory.createBrowser(SwtFactory.java:149)
[…]

It seems that studio can’t find xulrunner, (a runtime environment developed by the Mozilla Foundation to provide a common back-end for XUL user interface language applications)
The most common solution I could find through Google, is to install xulrunner through the ubuntu repos. Unfortunatly xulrunner 1.8 isn’t in the Natty repos so I had to download it myself.
You can find the latest 1.8 xulrunner here: Mozilla.org xulrunner-1.8.1.3.en-US.linux-i686-20080128.tar.gz

  • Unpack the contents of xulrunner-1.8.1.3.en-US.linux-i686-20080128.tar.gz
  • Rename the unpacked xulrunner directory to xulrunner-1.8
  • Move the newly created xulrunner-1.8 directory to /usr/bin
  • Fix permissions on the new directory: sudo chmod -R root:root /usr/bin/xulrunner-1.8

Final step is to add the following line to eclipse/eclipse.ini:
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8
After this, you can start your studio and create presentations with no problems!