Chapter 2. New features

Red Hat Process Automation Manager now includes a manifest file with all of the Maven artifact dependencies required for operation, including development of services in Business Central. You can download the artifacts and provide them in a mirror repository in order to use Red Hat Process Automation Manager without an outgoing connection to the public Internet.

Business Central now supports cloning specific branches from remote repositories.

Business Central now supports role-based access control for branches. Users can restrict access for a target branch to a specified collaborator. For example, if a user has security permission to update a project and has write permission for that branch based on the specified contributor type, the user can create new assets.

You can complete the following tasks in the test scenarios designer:

The following list provides a summary of process designer updates:

You can use the Saved Filter option on the following pages to set a task filter as the default filter:

The default filter is then applied each time you open the page.

Process Server now supports Prometheus metrics monitoring for your business assets in Red Hat Process Automation Manager. Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring toolkit that you can use with Red Hat Process Automation Manager to collect and store metrics related to the execution of business rules, processes, solvers, Decision Model and Notation (DMN) models, and other assets in Red Hat Process Automation Manager. You can access the stored metrics through a REST API call to the Process Server, through the Prometheus expression browser, or using a data-graphing tool such as Grafana.

You can configure Prometheus metrics monitoring for an on-premise Process Server instance, for Process Server on Spring Boot, or for a Process Server deployment on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

For information about enabling and using Prometheus metrics monitoring with Red Hat Process Automation Manager, see Managing and monitoring Process Server.

The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) designer contains a new Included Models tab that you can use to include other DMN models from your project in a specified DMN file. When you include a DMN model within another DMN file, you can reuse the DRD nodes and logic of the included model in that DMN file. This enhancement helps you more efficiently integrate DMN logic between different DMN models in your project.

For more information about DMN support in Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7.4, see the following resources:

JMS capabilities for Process Server are now available. With JMS capabilities you can interact with the server through the JMS API using an external AMQ message broker.

All deployments of Red Hat Process Automation Manager on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, except the fixed managed template (rhpam74-prod.yaml), now use OpenShift Startup Strategy for all Process Servers by default (the KIE_SERVER_STARTUP_STRATEGY environment variable) and also have the Business Central extension for OpenShift enabled (the KIE_WORKBENCH_CONTROLLER_OPENSHIFT_ENABLED environment variable). These features enable Business Central and Business Central Monitoring to discover all Process Servers in the same name space automatically. They eliminate the need to configure a controller.

The OpenShift Operator supplied with Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7.4 fully supports OpenShift 4.x.

Red Hat Process Automation Manager container images for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform now use a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 base layer and OpenJDK 11.

The Red Hat Business Optimizer Java API supports a more fluent form because of new with* methods:

solverFactory.getSolverConfig().withTerminationConfig(
new TerminationConfig().withMinutesSpentLimit(userInput));

solverFactory.getSolverConfig().withTerminationConfig(
new TerminationConfig().withMinutesSpentLimit(userInput));

In the Employee Rostering starter application for Red Hat Business Optimizer, you can set the work time limitations stipulated by employee contracts to a day, a week, a month, and a year.