Alfresco Process Services 1.7 Available Now

[rallegre]

On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce that Alfresco Process Services 1.7 has been released and is available now. This release contains a couple improvements as well as a number of important bug fixes. Here are the notable highlights:

• Connect APS to any external OAuth 2.0 service
• Form Editor Improvements
• Task & process REST API queries performance optimization

Connect APS to any external OAuth 2.0 service

Alfresco Process Services 1.7.0 now supports OAuth 2.0 Single Sign-On for the Process Services application. OAuth 2.0 support is already available for developers wishing to leverage the REST APIs. Providing capability for application authentication represents a next step towards a single standards-authorization and identity services across the Alfresco Digital Business Platform.

The following is an example of how to set up SSO with a Github account.

activiti-app.properties‍‍‍‍ configuration:

#set this true to enable oauth2 authentication
security.oauth2.authentication.enabled=true
#client id and client secret provided authorization server
security.oauth2.client.clientId=<put your github client id here>
security.oauth2.client.clientSecret=<put your github client secret here>
#security.oauth2.client.checkToken=http://localhost:9999/oauth/check_token
#URI where user will be redirected to login
security.oauth2.client.userAuthorizationUri=https://github.com/login/oauth/authorize
security.oauth2.client.tokenName=oauth_token
#URI to exchange token code
security.oauth2.client.accessTokenUri=https://github.com/login/oauth/access_token
#URI to get requested user details by providing access token
security.oauth2.client.userInfoUri=https://api.github.com/user‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

Github OAuth configuration:

Users can now sign in to APS 1.7 directly clicking the SSO option:

For more details, please refer to the configuring the OAuth 2.0 client documentation page.

Form Editor Improvements

Form designers can now change the stencil associated with a form after the form's initial creation. This means that designers no longer have to create a new form in order to change stencil.

A new date and time control is now available in the Form Editor. It allows selection of both date and time values.

Task & process REST API queries performance optimization

For REST API request operations that include Task and Process variables, you can set limits on the number of task and process instances returned. The following is an example of how to set up a limit for the /enterprise/historic-tasks/query endpoint. Using an environment with 15 existing tasks and no variable defined, let’s set the value of the query.historic.task.limit property to 3 directly by editing the activiti-app.properties file.

query.historic.task.limit=3
query.execution.limit=20000
query.historic.task.limit=20000
query.historic.process.limit=20000‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

After having restarted the server, let’s execute the query from the local REST API Explorer. Look for the /enterprise/historic-tasks/query endpoint and set the queryRequest as described below. { “includeTaskLocalVariables”: false }. Click the “try it out” button to get the result shown below.

The number of results is 15 (the complete list) because the variables are not retrieved and the limit is not reached. Changing the queryRequest to set the includeTaskLocalVariables to true, the variable are retrieved and the task limit will be reached and considered. Here is the result:

As you can see, the maximum number of retrieved variables is reached (one for each task) and only three tasks are included in the result. This enhancement, which has been introduced to meet the requests of some of our customers and partners, will be useful to developers to prevent performance issues. For more details, please refer to the Process and Task Query Lists documentation page.

For a complete list of improvements and instructions, please check out  Alfresco documentation.