8.6. Registering Service Handlers

Service handlers must be registered to execute domain-specific services as custom service tasks, this happens because the process only contains a high-level description of the service that needs to be executed; accordingly, a handler is responsible for invoking the service.

Service handlers are registered by adding a configuration file that specifies the implementation of class for each of the handlers to the classpath. You can specify which configuration files are loaded in a drools.session.conf file by using the drools.workItemHandlers property as a list of space delimited file names:

drools.workItemHandlers = CustomerWorkItemHandlers.conf

These file names should contain a Map of entries, the name and the corresponding WorkItemHandler instance that should be used to execute the service. The configuration file is using the MVEL script language to specify a map of type Map<String,WorkItemHandler>:

[
   "log" : new org.jbpm.process.instance.impl.demo.SystemOutWorkItemHandler(),
]

The implementation classes (and dependencies) also need to be added to the classpath of the server war.