Passing documents from Process to Process - without a document management system

Q&A
1

Hi there,

I want to pass documents from Process to Process (not a sub-process) - without a document management system. Is this possible?

What is the lifetime of a document? Does its ability to be used end when the process finishes? Can I send a document from process to process through messaging?

I have read the document-to-subprocess question but it does not solve my problem as I always get a document not found issue so have to assume the document has “died” with the process.

Many thanks and best regards
Seán

2

In the end I don’t think it is possible, or even practical to pass a document from process to process.

There are several reasons for this as follows:

  1. Chain of evidence - who says the document was uploaded to the previous step, the evidence will have moved if you pass the document. If you copy the document then you have a different problem…
  2. The size of the database - copying a document from process to process doesn’t work because you just make copies and then the DB will get very large.

However: I have found an easy open source document management system and it comes with Bonita Connectors.

I couldn’t get Alfresco 4.2.f to work (from what I’ve read nor have a lot of others) and Bonita doesn’t yet come with 5.0 connectors.

Disclaimer: I’m only a user of this product and have no other association with it.

http://www.openkm.com/

Download openKM 6.3 Community and install (it uses tomcat 7 so can be used at the same time as a Studio developer station on the same machine, for now anyway. This will change when Bonita supports tomcat 7).

Get it working - I don’t remember having any problems.

Download and unzip the Bonita Connectors here: http://wiki.openkm.com/index.php/Bonitasoft_Workflow_connector

NOTE: only use the ones for 6.3 Community (Bonita-OpenKM-Connectors-1.0.zip)

  1. Unzip to get the bunch of Connectors (zipped files)
  2. In Bonita Studio do Connector Imports (Development->Connectors->Import Connector), there are 9 of them
  3. Say yes when asked about replacing duplicates, which is annoying as there are several of them (Bonita can you fix this please?)

On the same page download the samples: Bonita-OpenKM-Connectors-Samples-1.0.zip

Import them as diagrams and once you have made sure openKM is running execute them to verify operation.

One thing I did find lacking though was the specification of how to define path and folder when required.

I found out eventually, this is simple case and as you grow to use the product:

Creating a folder for the first time path should be /okm:root/ and folder will folderName
When uploading a document path will be /okm:root/folderName/

you must have the / in the path…it’s not what I originally wanted but it works and is easy to implement and it works.

Good luck,

regards
Seán

3

Hi there
I’m looking for the same information : I’ve tried
http://community.bonitasoft.com/answers/how-get-document-pool-subprocess
but even in a subprocess, I get a DocumentNotFoundException.
Regards