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Chapter 13. Integration with Spring

13.1. Important Changes for Drools 6.0
13.2. Integration with Drools Expert
13.2.1. KieModule
13.2.2. KieBase
13.2.3. IMPORTANT NOTE
13.2.4. KieSessions
13.2.5. Kie:ReleaseId
13.2.6. Kie:Import
13.2.7. Annotations
13.2.8. Event Listeners
13.2.9. Loggers
13.2.10. Defining Batch Commands
13.2.11. Persistence
13.2.12. Leveraging Other Spring Features
13.3. Integration with jBPM Human Task
13.3.1. How to configure Spring with jBPM Human task

Drools Spring integration has undergone a complete makeover inline with the changes for Drools 6.0. The following are some of the major changes

In this section we will explain the kie namespace.

<kie:ksession> element defines KieSessions. The same tag is used to define both Stateful (org.kie.api.runtime.KieSession) and Stateless (org.kie.api.runtime.StatelessKieSession) sessions.

Starting with version 6.2, kie-spring allows for importing of kie objects from kjars found on the classpath. Two modes of importing the kie objects are currently supported.


@KContainer, @KBase and @KSession all support an optional 'name' attribute. Spring typically does "get" when it injects, all injections receive the same instance for the same set of annotations. the 'name' annotation forces a unique instance for each name, although all instance for that name will be identity equals.

Drools supports adding 3 types of listeners to KieSessions - AgendaListener, WorkingMemoryListener, ProcessEventListener

The kie-spring module allows you to configure these listeners to KieSessions using XML tags. These tags have identical names as the actual listener interfaces i.e., <kie:agendaEventListener....>, <kie:ruleRuntimeEventListener....> and <kie:processEventListener....>.

kie-spring provides features to define the listeners as standalone (individual) listeners and also to define them as a group.

Drools supports adding 2 types of loggers to KieSessions - ConsoleLogger, FileLogger.

The kie-spring module allows you to configure these loggers to KieSessions using XML tags. These tags have identical names as the actual logger interfaces i.e., <kie:consoleLogger....> and <kie:fileLogger....>.

This section provides details on leveraging other standard spring features when integrating with Drools Expert.

As shown above, the Spring XML contains the definition of the profiles. While loading the ApplicationContext you have to tell Spring which profile you’re loading.

There are several ways of selecting your profile and the most useful is by using the "spring.profiles.active" system property.

System.setProperty("spring.profiles.active", "development");
ApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("beans.xml");

Obviously, it is not a good practice to hard code things as shown above and the recommended practice is to keep the system properties definitions independent of the application.

-Dspring.profiles.active="development"

The profiles can also be loaded and enabled programmtically

...
GenericXmlApplicationContext ctx = new GenericXmlApplicationContext("beans.xml");
ConfigurableEnvironment env = ctx.getEnvironment();
env.setActiveProfiles("development");
ctx.refresh();
...
      

This chapter describes the infrastructure used when configuring a human task server with Spring as well as a little bit about the infrastructure used when doing this.

The jBPM human task server can be configured to use Spring persistence. Example 13.18, “Configuring Human Task with Spring” is an example of this which uses local transactions and Spring's thread-safe EntityManager proxy.

The following diagram shows the dependency graph used in Example 13.18, “Configuring Human Task with Spring”.


A TaskService instance is dependent on two other bean types: a drools SystemEventListener bean as well as a TaskSessionSpringFactoryImpl bean. The TaskSessionSpringFactoryImpl bean is howerver not injected into the TaskService bean because this would cause a circular dependency. To solve this problem, when the TaskService bean is injected into the TaskSessionSpringFactoryImpl bean, the setter method used secretly injects the TaskSessionSpringFactoryImpl instance back into the TaskService bean and initializes the TaskService bean as well.

The TaskSessionSpringFactoryImpl bean is responsible for creating all the internal instances in human task that deal with transactions and persistence context management. Besides a TaskService instance, this bean also requires a transaction manager and a persistence context to be injected. Specifically, it requires an instance of a HumanTaskSpringTransactionManager bean (as a transaction manager) and an instance of a SharedEntityManagerBean bean (as a persistence context instance).

We also use some of the standard Spring beans in order to configure persistence: there's a bean to hold the EntityManagerFactory instance as well as the SharedEntityManagerBean instance. The SharedEntityManagerBean provides a shared, thread-safe proxy for the actual EntityManager.

The HumanTaskSpringTransactionManager bean serves as a wrapper around the Spring transaction manager, in this case the JpaTransactionManager. An instance of a JpaTransactionManager bean is also instantiated because of this.

Example 13.18. Configuring Human Task with Spring

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:jbpm="http://drools.org/schema/drools-spring"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
       http://drools.org/schema/drools-spring org/drools/container/spring/drools-spring-1.2.0.xsd">

  <!-- persistence & transactions-->
  <bean id="htEmf" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
    <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="org.jbpm.task" />
  </bean>

  <bean id="htEm" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.support.SharedEntityManagerBean">
    <property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="htEmf"/>
  </bean>

  <bean id="jpaTxMgr" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager">
    <property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="htEmf" />
    <!-- this must be true if using the SharedEntityManagerBean, and false otherwise -->
    <property name="nestedTransactionAllowed" value="true"/>
  </bean>

  <bean id="htTxMgr" class="org.drools.container.spring.beans.persistence.HumanTaskSpringTransactionManager">
    <constructor-arg ref="jpaTxMgr" />
  </bean>

  <!-- human-task beans -->

  <bean id="systemEventListener" class="org.drools.SystemEventListenerFactory" factory-method="getSystemEventListener" />

  <bean id="taskService" class="org.jbpm.task.service.TaskService" >
    <property name="systemEventListener" ref="systemEventListener" />
  </bean>

  <bean id="springTaskSessionFactory" class="org.jbpm.task.service.persistence.TaskSessionSpringFactoryImpl"
        init-method="initialize" depends-on="taskService" >
    <!-- if using the SharedEntityManagerBean, make sure to enable nested transactions -->
    <property name="entityManager" ref="htEm" />
    <property name="transactionManager" ref="htTxMgr" />
    <property name="useJTA" value="false" />
    <property name="taskService" ref="taskService" />
  </bean>

</beans>

When using the SharedEntityManagerBean instance, it's important to configure the Spring transaction manager to use nested transactions. This is because the SharedEntityManagerBean is a transactional persistence context and will close the persistence context after every operation. However, the human task server needs to be able to access (persisted) entities after operations. Nested transactions allow us to still have access to entities that otherwise would have been detached and are no longer accessible, especially when using an ORM framework that uses lazy-initialization of entities.

Also, while the TaskSessionSpringFactoryImpl bean takes an useJTA parameter, at the moment, JTA transactions with Spring have not yet been fully tested.