Newbie - how to get emails sent for integrating human tasks in sequence?

Q&A
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I need to convince myself and a client that Bonita can be of practical use to them.

I am stumped not figuring out how to get started even with an extremely simple example process with two tasks/steps and an email to be sent to the assigned user for the first task (a manual task), and another (email) to be sent when that task is indicated (somehow) to be completed, by that user. The help page says that I first need to go to “the connectors list” (to add sending of an email). Where can I find that list?!

I found Developer…Connectors (I guess that is the one?), and added a new “EmailConnector” with the very cumbersome adding of host, port, authentication, message etc input parameters. I try “Test Connector” but it does not work - nothing happens. The pre-configured “Email (SMTP)” (connector) I manage to test successfully, but surely users are not expected to set host, port and other technical parameters each time?! How do I even create a connector of that type in the process diagram?

Thank you in advance for answering this probably very trivial (to you) question!

(After making this query to three specific Bonitasoft persons, via the “report a bug” and by answering the multiple marketing emails that resulted from registering, I have received no guidance except to endure some videos (I detest videos instead of written instructions) or post in this forum - so, please, can I have some help?)

1 Like
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You may see the -2 marks against the question, I’m not sure why, I know it wasn’t me but here are a couple of things I read from your post:

If you need convincing a product (or a product of type x) then are you sure you really know what you’re looking for?

You’re not clear on this, maybe you can elaborate.

You don’t say if you’ve even completed the getting started tutorial or looked at any of the existing projects. These will help you understand development within the environment. You should know that other BPM products are mostly the same, they all have the same style of development platform. The one thing Bonita has is that its free. Others always seem to cost something.

Here are the instructions to do a basic process that sends an email. As you will note you are definitely not using the Email Connector, your trying to develop an email connector, not use one.

  1. Open Studio
  2. File->New Diagram
  3. Click on Step 1
  4. Click tab Execution
  5. Select sub tab Connectors In-> Add
  6. Click Messaging select Email (SMTP) click Next
  7. Give the connector a name click Next
  8. As a developer you must give this information for the email server you are using. click Next
  9. Again give this information. click Next
  10. Again give this information. click Next
  11. Click Finish

And that’s it an email connector that can send an email before the user sees the screen to do a task.

Note: you have to put the effort in to use Bonita (or other BPM products), you will not get everything you want, that means knowing the following

  • Business Process Management,
  • Java,
  • Did I mention you need to know Business Process Management

You must also be able to architect a solution, this means understanding the technical operation of the tool, you can winge-and-whine as much as you like but without training yourself through courses or effort then no BPM tool will be able to provide you what you’re looking for.

As for not getting answers from the bug team, really? The team deal with paid for real bugs, they are not there to support community users, please use the community forum and you will get there.

Regarding the marketing emails, yeah, unsubscribe, I got annoyed with them also.

regards
Seán

PS: As this reply offers an answer your question, and if you like it, please Mark UP and/or as Resolved.

PPS: let us know how you get on

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Additionally to Seán explanation I create an example that demonstrate your use case: https://www.dropbox.com/s/h9n0fx1qgrze52v/DemoConnectorEmailDiagram-1.0.bos?dl=0

For testing email connector I recommend to use a small local SMTP server such as FakeSMTP. Once download and unzip you can run it typing the following command: java -jar fakeSMTP.jar

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Also can you tell me how did you “report a bug”? I cannot find any bug related to this topic. Thanks.