Sample ruote-rest client for Rails¶ ↑

This is code extracted from an actual production system and it’s very opinionated.

We use ruote-rest extensively in our service provisioning platform. The users interact with a Rails application which fires off processes to complete certain tasks.

This library might not make any sense to anyone but us, and I quite frankly don’t care (yet).

Don’t care?¶ ↑

I’ll be building a fresh gem for Rails from the lessons learned here, and it will accompany the forthcoming ruote-kit project (which is the planned replacement for ruote-rest). This code will die eventually, it is our first attempt and we learned a lot from using it every day.

Getting going¶ ↑

Layer this repo over your rails application.

You’ll need the following gems/plugins installed and working:

• delayed_job

• httparty

delayed_job¶ ↑

We cannot let the absence of ruote-rest spoil a perfectly good process launch, so all the launching is handled by delayed_job.

httparty¶ ↑

I never bother testing it, but a friend pointed out that the XML generated by ruote-rest is not ActiveSupport friendly, so I’ve made a note in ruote-kit to handle this.

Support¶ ↑

No, you’ve been warned. Get into #ruote or on the openwferu-users mail list. If convinced, I’ll accept Heineken as payment.

Example usage¶ ↑

The whole library launches process by means of ActiveRecord callbacks, here is an example

class Service < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :broker
  belongs_to :client

  launch_processes

  after_create :service_created!

  private

  def service_created!
    payload = {
      :type => 'Insurance',
      :number => 'I0001'
    }

    ruote_launch_process 'service_created', payload, self.participants
  end

  def self.participants
    { :broker => self.broker, :client => self.client }
  end
end

Then the process definition might look like this:

class ServiceProcess0 < OpenWFE::ProcessDefinition
  sequence do
    <%= get_participant(:broker) %> :activity => 'Credit vet'
    <%= get_participant(:client) %> :activity => 'Sign debit order'
    clerk :activity => 'File application'
  end
end

The ‘get_participant()’ helper will make a participant name that looks like this:

Model-ID -> broker-2 or client-30

It pulls the information out the final hash parameter to ruote_launch_process (for the participant maps).

Spec’ing launches¶ ↑

Use mocha to test the launches:

describe Service, "process launches" do

  describe "when service is created" do
    client = Factory(:client)
    broker = Factory(:broker)

    service = Service.new(:type => 'Insurance', :client => client, :broker => broker)

    expects_process('service_created', { :type => 'Insurance', :number => 'I0001' }, { :client => client, :broker => broker }

    service.save
  end
end

Using mocha expectations you can set extremely fine controls to test the presence or absence of payload and participant parameters. The spec_helper.rb file in lib/ruote has plenty more to choose from :)

In close¶ ↑

I’ve had to strip a lot of good stuff from the spec’s so they don’t expose our business model, but I’m sure you can figure out what else is possible…