Chapter 1. Introduction to DTGov

1.1. Design Time Governance

The DTGov project layers Design Time Governance functionality on top of an S-RAMP repository. These two projects work together to provide the following:

Store and Govern artifacts
Custom Governance Workflows
Integrated Governance Human Task Management

This guide will discuss the various pieces of functionality provided by DTGov and how to configure and use them.

1.2. Use Cases

In addition to a general framework for triggering business workflows based on changes to artifacts in the S-RAMP repository, the DTGov project focuses on the following specific Governance Use Cases:

Deployment Lifecycle Management

This guide will not only discuss the generic governance capabilities provided by the DTGov project, but also the specific Use-Cases listed above.

1.3. How DTGov Works

Workflows are created from JBoss jBPM (BPMN2) process definitions.

A version of jBPM is embedded in the deployed dtgov.war. This version of jBPM is configured to use the S-RAMP repository as the source for workflow definitions.

To use a workflow with DTGov, the jBPM workflow files must be bundled into a Jar file named "dtgov-workflows.jar" and uploaded to the DTGov S-RAMP repository. There are several methods than can be used to deploy the workflow jar file to S-RAMP. We recommend that you use maven.

The embedded jBPM pulls the dtgov-workflow.jar out of S-RAMP at runtime and uses the workflow definitions found therein.

In this context, "runtime" refers to whenever a new workflow instance is created (typically triggered by an artifact being added or changed in the s-ramp repository).

Any human tasks that are used in any DTGov workflow will appear in the Tasks UI included in the DTGov UI (http://localhost:8080/dtgov-ui)
A workflow deployment only shows up in the dtgov-ui/#deployments page once a lifecycle management jBPM process is kicked off for it.

1.4. The Sample Process Workflow: "SimpleReleaseProcess"

A sample Process Workflow ("SimpleReleaseProcess") is packaged with DTGov
OOTB SimpleReleaseProcess does "Lifecycle Management" governance on an artifact by monitoring the S-RAMP repository periodically (60 sec default) - this monitoring takes the form of a query on the repository.
When an artifact matches that S-RAMP query as configured in the DTGov config file (dtgov.properties) which is mapped to the SimpleReleaseProcess a new jBPM process instance is created for that artifact. The process can do anything it wants at that point.