Attachment service for SAP Build Process Automation (trial)

[Dinu]

Recently I got a little annoyed when I realized that I cannot have document service in my SAP BTP trial account to try out File Upload / Attachment in forms. Thus blocked me from looking at "Document Centric Approval Process" from the store. I am blocked because document service is not available on trial. But, interestingly, SAP Build Process Automation does not require SAP Document Service. It only requires access to a CMIS compliant repository. It does not use the reuse UI from Document Service. That is good news as one can get a CMIS compliant document service from Apache Chemistry project. Even though this project is now retired, the tools it offers still works and is good enough for playing around. Specifically, the Fileshare Repository should be good enough.

And, it was good enough. I managed to package Fileshare Repository as a BTP application running on Cloud Foundry runtime using xsuaa for authentication. Just like Process Automation wants it. You can see all the details of this work in the github project.  But, if you don't want to know all about what is involved in this and just want to enable File Upload Input field in your form in the process, here is the shortest path:

echo "https://github.com/dinurp/opencims-file-repository/releases/download/v1.0.0/opencmis-file-repository_1.0.0.mtar" | cf deploy

You need to have cf CLI with multiapps plugin available to deploy to Cloud Foundry space with 1G of free memory. Login to the space with cf CLI and execute the above command. If you have access to BAS, open a terminal. The terminal in BAS has all what is needed. It will deploy an app with Fileshare Repository from Apache Chemistry and create the destination for accessing it from SAP Build Process Automation. Make sure to assign Key User role collection to yourself so that you have the necessary authorizations.

A word of caution: this "service" is running in Cloud Foundry on ephemeral disk. When the app goes down, any content on it is lost. So the "feature" is, easy to reset everything, just restart the deployed app.

If you found this useful and tried it, I would appreciate your comment here.