Extending LiveCycle with Custom Services

You can create your own custom services and add them to the LiveCycle ES repository. No, we are not talking about processes here. As a reminder, any process is ultimately a service, too, with one and only one method: invoke(). In contrast, this section is about multifunctional, multimethod services. How do you create those? In a nutshell, you start with a Java POJO class. Once you have a POJO, you may drop it into the LiveCycle service container and use the public methods of the class as service operations within a LiveCycle ES workflow. The simplicity of POJO gets augmented by the packaging: along with the class, you have to JAR the component.xml descriptor file plus the JARs of the support classes your POJO depends on. The devil, as usual, is in the details; see the Adobe LiveCycle ES SDK Help, under “Developing Components.”

The following sections illustrate two types of custom services: infrastructure services that make LiveCycle ES read users and groups from an enterprise data store instead of its own internal repository, and functional services that will be directly embedded in the Retailer and Supplier processes.

Custom Providers for the User and Group Repository

Imagine that the users of the enterprise are maintained in the database table. How do you tell LiveCycle ES to recognize the custom user and group repository? This is the topic of this section.

Out of the box, LiveCycle ES allows you to plug in an enterprise user repository kept ...

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