Customizing and Extending Camunda Tasklist (Introduction)

As an active contributor to Camunda forum, I noticed that many people are looking to use the OOTB Camunda Tasklist application as their front-end application through which users can work on their tasks and interact with the engine but they have so many concerns which either prevent them from going through this path or lead them to end up addressing these concerns incorrectly.

In production, business data is a major part of any process instance so handling business data is so critical in any process application to be implemented so things as populating data from external sources, saving data to external sources, maintaining a link between process instance(s) and corresponding business object and server-side validation are needed in almost every process.

In production, usually there is a need to have complex user forms which are supposed to be presented in a user-friendly manner and this might require utilizing external UI components such as advanced text editor or gmaps.

In production, communication and interactions with external sources should be done in a secure manner so for example at least only authenticated users can read data from external sources.

In production, usually there is a need to have business-specific UIs such as custom search, track or statistics pages so for example business user can search across both business data source and process engine.

So in short, people are looking to have a usable production-ready Tasklist application.

In this series of stories, I would like to write my experience in addressing above major concerns and to explain with code examples how I managed to have a production-ready Tasklist application using the available flexible extension points and API.

This series requires basic knowledge in Camunda BPM platform, plain HTML, JavaScript, AngularJS 1.X and Java.

So be ready for our first topic which is about “Using Custom or External Script” in which

• We are going to create employee database table.
• Create Java JAX-RS application to read from employee database table.
• Create and add custom AngularJS service to consume the created RESTful service.
• Inject and use the custom AngularJS service in a simple embedded html form.

In this upcoming topic, a simple communication with external source (read from database table) to be demonstrated in-action. More advanced types of communication and interactions with external sources to be presented in subsequent topics.