topic Re: Questions about Activiti in Alfresco Archive

Questions about Activiti

andreyilyin — Thu, 02 May 2013 09:17:27 GMT

Hi all,I am currently evaluating Activiti for building soft collection software and have a few questions:1) I want to break the whole process into several smaller process definitions, e.g. 1st phase: Classification - check what's the debt age, amount etc and select collection strategy. 2nd pha

Re: Questions about Activiti

jbarrez — Thu, 02 May 2013 09:42:09 GMT

This does sound awfully like you are filling in a RFP and you want us to do your homework. Some questions make me get the feeling you didn 't invest much time into Activiti yet. So my answers will be concise.

1) Yes, possible. Use a call activity and subprocesses

2) Yes possible. This is basically the task system in Activiti. In BPMN this is a UserTask

3) By wrapping steps in an embedded subprocess and attaching a boundary event to act upon the receival of the event.

4) That will be the same process instance. See next question too.

5) That is the default Activiti behaviour. We *never* keep something in memory unless it is actively continuing process execution. If your process instance is waiting on external events, it is in the database persisted (until forever if you want that).

6) You can deploy a new process definition. Any new process instance started now runs against the new version. In-flight changing the process definition is tricky and hard (but can be done with some complex coding). I wouldn't advise it though.

7) See previous question

😎 Yes. Activiti does not lock anything.

9) Then you need to model this explicitly in your process definition.

10) Yes. See TaskQuery Api.

11) No. Serializing it as a BLOB would be going against all that Activiti stands for. Check the database schema. Each variable type is seperatly stored, well typed and all.

12) Timers go into the database. The Job Executors polls regularly (configurable) to see if any of them fires.

13) Activiti is stateless. You can have as many as you want.

Re: Questions about Activiti

andreyilyin — Thu, 02 May 2013 10:37:25 GMT

Thank you for answers, I physically do not have time to investigate all this stuff now, so that's why I am asking. Would be nice to have some kind of architectural document to show everyone how activiti works internally and some examples. Unfortunately I do not have BPM background and having issues trying to understand how to model the business process correctly.

Re: Questions about Activiti

jbarrez — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:46:35 GMT

There is: http://www.manning.com/rademakers2/ 😉