How To Interact with The Oracle Process Automation.

The aim of this post is to show practical end to end setup to enable interaction of Oracle Process Automation(OPA) with other cloud services or with any enterprise system capable to invoke REST APIs.

This is prerequisite for the following-up posts showing OIC (Integration) bi-directional communication with the OPA and VBCS (JavaScript based UI) to trigger the process.

OCI Process Automation is a cloud native, low-code service that helps developers quickly design, deploy, and manage approval workflows across applications.

Integration with Oracle Process Automation (OPA) enables you to extend enterprise applications and create Process Automation tasks for automating certain business processes in your organization.

This post covers following scenarios:

• You're using your own web-based UI and want to only access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Process Automation workflow information via REST end points.
• You're using your own web-based UI and embedding the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Process Automation CCA components in your web application.
• You're using your own mobile UI and want to display Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Process Automation information.

All the Oracle OCI Platform Services are secured by OAuth 2.0. For the OCI PaaS Services access the following grant types supported:

• Resource Owner Password Credentials Grant Type
• Assertion Grant Type
• Authorization Code Grant Type
• Implicit Grant Type

This document will show the first grant type to interact with the OPA. We must do the following steps:

1. Configure Confidential Application to Authenticate with OAuth. This represents resource owner granted access to OPA.
2. Configure Postman to obtain authorization token
3. Exploit OPA Management REST API to interact with process application

Configuring The Confidential Application.

(You need Identity Domain Administrator or Application Administrator credentials to perform this task)

Before you can use the REST API with OAuth in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Process Automation, you need to register your OPA instance as a confidential application in Oracle Identity Cloud Service(IDCS or Identity Domain). Confidential application appears as the registered client to obtain Resource owner Authorization Code Grant type.

It is important to set in the client configuration following Grant types:

• Resource Owner, Refresh Token, Authorization code

Redirect URL is mandatory client application URL where the callback from the resource server is redirected.

• In our case it will be OIC Gen3 instance callback URL because in the following-up blogs we will trigger the OPA process from Integration and from VBCS (https://{{OICURL}}/cloudgate/v1/oauth2/callback)

Then we need to Add Scopes which represents resources connected to Process Automation – for calling OPA Process management APIs and Decision Services API.

See more details in (Configure a Confidential Application to Authenticate with OAuth).

After the activating the confidential application we have prerequisites to access OPA resources. We have Confidential Application necessary to obtain the authorization token to interact with the OPA instance.

Configuring The Postman to obtain authorization token.

We will create new postman collection with new Request which will list the process instances running in the OPA platform.

• Chose GET operation and URL: {{OPAURL}}/process/api/v1/instances in the URL Bar
• Chose OAuth 2.0 as the Authorization type and Request Header as the placeholder for the authorization data.

Configuring the token obtain parameters.

- Callback URL must be the same as it was provided in the confidential application even if we are doing now requests from testing tool – POSTMAN

-  Auth URL: {{IDCS/IDom service}} /oauth2/v1/authorize

-  Access Token URL: {{IDCS/IDom service}} /oauth2/v1/token

-  Client ID: Confidential application from the previous step Client ID

-  Client Secret: Confidential application from the previous step Secret ID

-  Scope: Confidential application from the previous step resource with the ((OPARESOURCE/process}}

After filling the parameters, we can generate the first token clicking the button “Generate New Access Token”

Ready to use OPA Management REST API

 Now we can Send Request and see the results from the REST API for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Process Automation.

Very similar way you can repeat the process for any Oracle OCI Platform service and OCI Service scopes and use OCI Management API.

References:

•      Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Process Automation as a native service for developers and business experts to develop process oriented applications
•      Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Process Automation
•      Configure a Confidential Application to Authenticate with OAuth
•      REST API for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Process Automation
•      Process Automation Roles
•      Authenticate with OAuth 2.0 authentication in Postman

Credits: Niall Commiskey, Stan Tanev, Valeria Chiran, Andrew Bond, Marcel Straka, Deepak Arora, Juan Carlos Gonzáles Carrero, Harris Qureshi, Juergen Kress, Ravi Pinto, Giovanni Conte

#integration #EiPaaS #oraclecloud #oracleIntegration #OCI #opa #ProcesAutomation