Developing Workflows to OIM 11g - the basics

OIM & BPEL Working together? 

OIM 11g release brought us the powerful world of Oracle BPEL based workflows: from this release on, Oracle BPEL is the workflow engine to be used by OIM in all sorts of requests and their related approval processes. While this integration makes OIM workflows way more powerful and flexible when compared to OIM 9.x, the development process is quite different. The idea for this article is to provide tips for making the development process more straightforward.

First let’s take a look in the main development steps for having a new workflow:
1. Generating basic workflow: OIM provides an utility that can be used to generate a JDeveloper project that contains a basic BPEL Workflow process:

‘ant -f new_project.xml -f new_project.xml’

The ‘new_project.xml’ is located at $OIM_HOME/server/workflows/new-workflow.

You have to provide the application name (which will become the JDeveloper Applciation Name), the project name (which will become the JDeveloper project in the application) and the process name (which needs to be unique across applications and will be the BPEL process name).

The command line will generate a JDeveloper application and you can copy it to wherever your JDeveloper is installed and start working on your customizations.