topic act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId? in Alfresco Archive

act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

dognose — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 12:44:40 GMT

Hello,in our act_hi_actinst table, we have aprox 10.000 entries of the type userTask by now. However there are about 400 entries of the type "userTask", that have taskId set to null…SELECT * FROM `act_hi_actinst` WHERE ACT_TYPE_ = 'userTask'AND ISNULL( TASK_ID_ ) ‍‍‍‍‍‍I compared the times of thos

Re: act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

dognose — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 12:48:04 GMT

ps.: How do edit the post? Manual linebreaks are wrapped unnice, hard to read

Re: act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

dognose — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 13:20:31 GMT

I now performed the following update (on the test system) to update those values, for which the condition matches:


UPDATE `act_hi_actinst` aha 
INNER JOIN `act_hi_taskinst` aht
 ON
  aha.PROC_INST_ID_ = aht.PROC_INST_ID_ AND
  aha.ACT_NAME_ = aht.NAME_ AND
  aha.START_TIME_ = aht.START_TIME_
SET aha.TASK_ID_ = aht.ID_ 
WHERE 
 aha.ACT_TYPE_ = 'userTask' AND
 ISNULL(aha.TASK_ID_) AND NOT ISNULL(aht.ID_);

Finally, a total of 5 tasks have been left over where the Completion time was +/-1 seconds in both tables.

So, I could fix those manually.

Core question remains: Would it be save to reinsert the missing TaskIDs in act_hi_actinst, or is activity (internaly) knowing, that these are processes from 5.12 and assuming the field to be 'null'?

Re: act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

dognose — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 13:44:56 GMT

Loaded an old dump from 5.12 - there the column hasn't even been there in act_hi_varinst.
So its not a "bug", but simple the fact, that after the update of the db scheme, all the taskId fields for "5.12-activiti-instances" are null.

Re: act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

jbarrez — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 08:37:06 GMT

wow you did some nice investigation yourselves there!

However I'm not following completely your explanation above … this is what I found :

- The table ACT_HI_VARINST was introduced in 5.11 upgrade
- The TASK_ID_ column of ACT_HI_ACTINST was also introduced in 5.11 upgrade

So that doesn't seem to match what you found, right?

Regarding to your question:

"Core question remains: Would it be save to reinsert the missing TaskIDs in act_hi_actinst, or is activity (internaly) knowing, that these are processes from 5.12 and assuming the field to be 'null'?"

Yes it is safe. Once created, Activiti will not use these values anymore (except for updates, but it can handle nulls)

Re: act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

dognose — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:16:34 GMT

Hi,

you are right - it was 5.10 we used prior: Scheme History says: create(5.10) upgrade(5.10->5.13)

Alright, then that's the reason. So i'll go with updating the missing variables.

Thx for the quick response.

Sidenode: >>Those didn't match, because the START_TIME_ was slightly different (+/- 1 second)<< shouldn't those be equal in any case?
(Assuming you are using NOW() in the queries, so it might be a issue, when the start happens around 490-510 ms of a second due to internal rounding)

Re: act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

dognose — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 16:50:02 GMT

On another sidenode: >>Yes it is safe. Once created, Activiti will not use these values anymore<<

We encountered the problems, when using the following statement:


HistoricActivityInstance activityInstance = this.historyService.createHistoricActivityInstanceQuery()
     .activityInstanceId(processVar.getActualInstance().getActivityInstanceId()).singleResult();

The returned activitiInstance has task id null for the mentioned processes.

Reason:
We are using processvariables on a "process" Scope (businessProcess.setVariable) and not on the task Scope (businessProcess.setTaskVariable)

This means (assuming it is because of that), that act_hi_detail has always taskId `null`. To know, in which Task a variable has been changed, we are using the HistoricActivitiyInstance service to determine the taskID based on the activitiid provided by the act_hi_detail table. And there, we are getting taskId `null`, when its not set inside the act_hi_actinst table.

(So, maybe its not used by activiti - but its available using the services exposed in the public API.)

Re: act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

jbarrez — Tue, 11 Feb 2014 15:36:35 GMT

Ok, that last use case makes sense. Indeed in that case it would be an issue if you use it like that

"Those didn't match, because the START_TIME_ was slightly different (+/- 1 second)<< shouldn't those be equal in any case?"

I'm not following that, can you explain?

Re: act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

sakthi1970 — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 02:43:33 GMT

I noticed the difference in the millosecond between table ACT_RU_TASK column CREATE_TIME_ and ACT_HI_TASKINST column START_TIME_ .. say out of 176 records, i found 7 had that difference. It would have been best if the main table ACT_RU_TASK or ACT_HI_TASKINST start time is used to update the other table. They probably used sysdate or something. I'm using ORACLE.

Is there a patch or a way to ensure its always in sync ?

Re: act_hi_actinst - userTask and taskId?

jbarrez — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 16:22:12 GMT

It's probably because time actually moved on when those two datas are made … I agree it would maybe be better to have them in sync

> Is there a patch or a way to ensure its always in sync ?

um. you just found it… how would there be a patch already?
If it's a problem for you, you either create an issue so we can track or you fix it and create a pull request