Agile Enterprise Application Development with Flex

The Warehouse Processes Under the Hood

Now that you know the business use case, let’s look at the implementation side. We are going to discuss four topics:

• Using the LiveCycle API from the custom Flex application, which absolves us from the confines of the prebuilt Adobe Workspace. We will be illustrating snippets of the WarehouseWorkspace application that accompanies this chapter.

• Orchestrating processes with asynchronous events. You will learn how to build and publish or subscribe to messaging-like communication between processes. In particular, as you will see a bit later, our SupplierProcess is dispatching a custom event—with LineItemChanged acting as a message producer. On the other hand, AndyNailsProcess is a process that is listening for this event, acting as a message consumer; this event notifies AndyNailsProcess to consider reordering nails from the Andy’s Nails manufacturer.

• Extending LiveCycle ES functionality with business-specific Custom Services. For instance, the SupplierProcess depends on the operation handleApprovedOrder() from a custom SupplierService. Importantly, it is used seamlessly, side by side with standard operations such as UserService.assignTask() and SetValue.execute(). The handleApprovedOrder() operation dispatched the LineItemChanged event.

• Plugging in your own repository of users and groups from an enterprise database through a custom infrastructure service known as custom authentication and directory service providers.

We will start in the reverse order. ...