Duplicate Links issue in Process Portal

Duplicate links issue is a well know issue in 7.x versions while promoting the code to the higher environments. Most of the times when  the snapshot is deployed in to the higher environments, the project page links from the previous snapshots are still active and visible in My project sections.
Reason behind this:
Normally when the snapshots is promoted to a higher environment, previous snapshot of the same Process Application will be deactivated. But many a time we might have noticed this is not happening. This is a know issue which can even be found in release notes of the initial versions of 7.x, which is not fixed yet. This generally happens when some of the below action were performed:

Custom Java Connector in IBM BPM

IBM BPM (Lombardi), by default provides many java Integration connectors which can used to perform different operations like connecting to database, XSL transformation connector, LDAP connector, mail connector etc. But despite of all the available connectors we might need to perform certain operations which is not possible with IBM BPM like pulling data from some external system (Say, Filenet). In this kind of scenarios we can leverage the IBM BPM capability of custom java connectors or Webservice connectors.

In this post, lets see how to create simple Custom Java connector and pass an input to it and get a complex object as an output.

Different Process Designers to connect to Same Process center

            One of the advantages in development using IBM BPM (for that matter, in previous version of 7.x and 6.x) is that it is a client server architecture. You install the process center in a single machine (Server) and can connect to that process center just having a client (Process Designer or Authoring Environment) in the machine in the same network that you are working on.

           Lets see how to configure the Process Designer to connect to a Process Center that is installed in a different machine.

How to Use Java package in side Lombardi (IBM BPM) ??

We all know that we can deploy custom jar files to Lombardi and use those classes with connectors.
But do we know that it is also possible to access those classes directly from the server script in the service where write the code using js. Here is an example of how to use that.
First add your jar files inside the teamworks libary which is available in location <installation                     directory>\applications\teamworks.ear\teamworks.war if your are using Lombardi Teamworks 6.2.
Alternatively if you are using Lombardi 7.x , add the jar as server file in the files available in on the Left side palette in the Authoring environment.

Assign values to string list from coach

When we have this kind of scenario  where we need to capture values and assign that to a list variable say "tw.local.ListForExport[i] " , first thing that comes to mind is for loop with something like this.

for(i=0;i<someValue;i++){   
    <#= tw.local.ListForExport[i] #>= i;
}

But by now you might have found that this approach is not working. The reason is that, above syntax will be evaluted while loading the coach itself. By the time you wanted to assign some value to the variable the vairable itself is gone and will be replaced with the value in that variable.

One way to successfully assign the string list is to use a multi select element (Hidden) from coach and assign the string list to that multi select element.

Portal Customization - New Task Alert

When a task is assigned to a user, the task gets routed to the particular user's Inbox.
The user might not look into his/her inbox everytime to check whether a task has been assigned to him/her or not.
To alert the user when a task is assigned to him/her (or) a task is routed to his/her inbox,  New Task Alert mechanism is used.

New Task Alert Mechanism:

•  An alert will be prompted to the user to showcase that a new task has been routed to his/her inbox.
•  This mechanism is mainly used to help the user avoid keep on checking his/her inbox.
•  Alert gets displayed in the current page where the user is looking at.