What's new in NetWeaver BPM 7.31 SP05

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EhP1 for NetWeaver 7.3 SP05 was released at the end of October. It comes with several enhancements and improvements for Business Process Management and Process Orchestration scenarios.

Open UI integration

Most notable, you can now use any web UI technology to build task UIs for BPM, for instance the HTML5 toolkit from SAP. Before, user tasks could be linked only to WebDynpro Java, WebDynpro ABAP or Visual Composer composer UIs.

Now, you can enter a relative URL, which is called at runtime to open the task. You can also specify the input and output XSD type of the task.

The task instance ID is passed as a HTTP parameter, so the application can retrieve the task instance data via the BPM Java API.

See below for a sample task UI built in HTML5:

Using CSS media queries, task UIs can even be optimized for different devices (mobile, tablet, desktop).

Monitoring of BPM actions

Since SP04, actions on user tasks and messages received by intermediate message events are processed asynchronously from an action queue. This queue can now be monitored by an administrator.

For instance, messages that have been correlated to a certain process instance (correlation condition is met) but have not yet been consumed (because there is no active token at the intermediate message event) will be listed. In case of an error, the action is retried automatically several times before it finally fails.

Export of processes and tasks to spreadsheet

You can now export process and task instances to a spreadsheet from NWA. This allows running some advanced queries and filters on the data and creating custom charts.

URL Parameters for Processes and Tasks in NWA

The Manage Process and Manage Task applications in NWA can now be parameterized and called from external applications. For instance, in order to display all process instances which are “in progress” and have been started by user “guest”, use the URL

http://<host>:<port>/nwa/bpm-processes?lifecycle=InProgress&user=Guest

For a full list of available parameters, please refer to the product documentation.

Process Orchestration

There is also new functionality for scenarios using the Process Orchestration installation option (joint deployment of NW PI and NW BPM on a single Java system). In these scenarios, PI messages will be sent to/from BPM processes. Using the BPM Log Viewer, you can now check which messages a BPM process now has sent and/or received, or which BPM process has received a certain message.

Using the various event types, you can also check for messages which have not been correlated or consumed by any BPM process at all.

Summary

For a full list of changes in SP05 including also other NetWeaver components, please check the relevant release notes.