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Rendering PCS with REST service in APEX

Since Cloud has been introduced by Oracle the developers are focusing to migrate their applications and integrate cloud components with each others.

I was involved in an integration POC for a customer. When I was asked about the possibilities to render PCS tasks in Oracle APEX, my answer was directly YES.  Because I knew APEX supports REST and since Oracle Process Cloud Service does it too, there should be no doubt about the possibilities.

In this shot blog I will explain how to do this. showing all running PCS instances in APEX and submit/approve/reject selected one.

Oracle PCS has a complete API available to make this possible.

  • Create you PCS process in cloud
  • Create two services in APEX
  • Create a report page to show all open PCS Tasks
  • Create a modal page to edit and submit the Task

 

Lets start with APEX part directly.

  • Go to Shared components-> open Web service References
  • Create a new RESR Service

  • Add your info to the page, Method is GET and Basic Authentication is included.

  • On the next page don’t include any paramaters for now.
  • Click Next, now Select JSON as output format
  • You see on this page, you can create but also you can Test your REST service.

 

  • Now create a report page “Report on Web Service” and select your recently created Web Service Reference

  • Add a collection name to store the JSON response

  • Once you report is created, you will need to load the data properly.
  • Create a button to execute the process
  • Your process definition will look like below image:

  • Your report will look like below image:

  • At this point your done to load the open instances/Taks from PCS
  • You will face two issues if you develop locally.
    • ACL issue for HTTP
      • Create ACL to access the cloud server
    • Authentication ERROR
      • you need to add a new process in APEX but this time you select in Operation
  • Now go to your report source to extract the JSON CLOB to normal report attributes

  • Now if you hit Load data, your data from PCS will be loaded in your interactive report.

In the next part of this blog I will write about submitting page.