topic Statefulness of IdentityService in Alfresco Archive

Statefulness of IdentityService

bmarkmann — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 19:39:47 GMT

It seems like the services provided by the ProcessEngine are all stateless, except the IdentityService… ie. in most cases, you use a service to retrieve some bean and then work with that bean. Based on the way that it's defined in the Spring configuration, it looks like the IdentityService (and th

Re: Statefulness of IdentityService

bmarkmann — Sun, 17 Nov 2013 01:59:19 GMT

So, for anyone wondering… I built a little test app that spun off 20 threads, and each created a process instance. In between setting the authenticated user and kicking off the process instance, I put a randomized timer so that there was overlap between the threads setting different users and kicking off process instances. Turned out each thread started the its process as the correct user, even with the overlapping calls. After some more digging through the source, I found the reason – the identity set by the call to the identity service and used by the runtime service is stored in a thread-local string:

https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/blob/master/modules/activiti-engine/src/main/java/org/activiti/engine/impl/identity/Authentication.java

Anyway, this was just a random question I had that wasn't entirely clear from the user guide… after building this little test I then stumbled across this in the JavaDocs: "void setAuthenticatedUserId(String authenticatedUserId): Passes the authenticated user id for this particular thread. All service method (from any service) invocations done by the same thread will have access to this authenticatedUserId." Mystery solved. 🙂

Re: Statefulness of IdentityService

frederikherema1 — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 08:31:20 GMT

Thanks for coming back on this. Indeed, authentication mechanism uses thread-local storage of the current authenticated used, and is cleaned up afterwards as well, to make sure thread-pools (which reuse threads) don't get authentication mixed up…