topic Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe in Alfresco Archive

Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

mproch — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:23:59 GMT

Currently there is no way of showing process instances for given process definition in UI. I made new tab in Activiti Probe, providing this functionality. In left menu there is process definitions list (as in Database tab). When one clicks on process definition table with basic process instance info

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

frederikherema1 — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 07:36:25 GMT

Hi,

There are no concrete plans around this yet, but we have discussed this functionality and this is indeed a nice feature which is frequently asked for by Activiti users.
You said you decided to implement it yourself, did you manage to implement it?

Good job spreading the Activiti word at Warsaw JUG!!

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

wir33658 — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 07:52:48 GMT

Hi,

Maciek that has been requested a couple of times like here

http://forums.activiti.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=37

I even opened up a JIRA : http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/ACT-426

in behalf of someone told me to do that, so it gets more severity.

What you did sounds exactly what its needed. And I am still supprised that this seems not to be on the roadmap and that it is considered only "a NICE feature" as int the mail from Frederik.

In my opinion, this is actually pretty essential. But, as we can see in the forum it looks like the whole Activity-Project is driven by developers and not by process engineers.

Cheers, Rob.

P.S. Maciek: If your implementation works, thumbs up and thanks for your work. Is this somewhere available even it is not on the projects path ?

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

tombaeyens — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 07:56:23 GMT

This looks promising! Can you create a branch and share this contribution so that we can have a closer look?

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

mproch — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:43:01 GMT

Yes, I managed to implement this. I created branch for this feature:
https://svn.codehaus.org/activiti/activiti/branches/mproch/

There are some issues with http cache of generated diagram - currently one has to refresh whole Activiti Probe to see changes after completing task. I'm also not sure about which columns should be displayed for process instance
thanks for feedback, waiting for comments,

maciek

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

tombaeyens — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:34:31 GMT

Joram checked it out and showed me a screenshot. Looks awsome.
We're very impressed with how much you've managed to accomplish with so little assistance. Great work!
I'll ask Erik (our UI guy) to look at your work and the question you raised about refreshing whole of probe.

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

frederikherema1 — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:27:38 GMT

Nice work, lookin' great!

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

jbarrez — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:23:38 GMT

Great work!!
As Tom stated, it's really impressive you were able to figure it all out without ever seeing any question on the forum!

There a few small remarks I have (see attached screenshot):

* The display diagram button is too small on my machine
* I would rename 'Dispaly diagram' to 'Actions', and call the button 'Display diagram'
* I would remove the 'ended' column, since it will always be false
* I would add a column with the start date of the process instance
* On the left list of processes: is that the name + version ?

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

erikwinlof — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:29:23 GMT

Really really nice work Maciek!

I'm very impressed that you've got this far and seem to have followed our patterns very well.
Just a few small suggestions to make it fit 100% with what we have today:

1. Add a title above the process-instances list and move the pagination to the right (example found in explorers "task-list.get.html")
2. Move the processes and process-instances from the "management" directory to a new "processes" directory (thats what we have in explorer)
3. Make sure "loadProcessInstances" from the ManagementService to the ProcessService
4. If youre up for it, rename the "processes.get.desc.xml" webscript to "process-definitions.get.desc.xml" (just to make it a bit clearer)

…then I was on my way asking you to move your new event "clickFormEventButton" out form activiti-core.js to "activiti-webapp-probe/src/main/webapp/js/activiti-app.js" where it can be defined as Activiti.event.clickFormEventButton = "clickFormEventButton";
…but then I realized that none of the webapps are doing this as intended, shame on us 😞
…you are very very welcome to behave better though 🙂

Regarding the caching problems you have:

If youre having trouble with the refereshing of freemarker templates or webscripts,
please try setting the "mode" in surf.xml to "development" instead.
<!– Pick the mode: development, preview, production –>
<mode>production</mode>

If you're having browser cache problems, try adding some javascript: "?noCache=" + new Date.getTime() at the end of the url to the image your displaying.

Otherwise, I believe that if we could get Jorams wishes in I think this is definitively something we should merge in cause its looking great!

Cheers and welcome to Activiti 🙂

:: Erik

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

mproch — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:45:23 GMT

Thanks for feedback.
I guess that activiti webapps are simple enough and code is quite clear - so I had just done some find-copy-paste-rename cycles
I'll include your remarks, I think that maybe I'll switch to using HistoricProcessInstance to get process instance list - as it has some additional data such as start date/user. I was bit confused by this - I thought that HistoricProcessInstance is created only when process finishes, and before that all the data is in ProcessInstance.

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

jbarrez — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:48:38 GMT

@Maciek: the history is always kept up to date with the runtime.
You can base your queries on the historicProcessInstance. Note that this will not work when people lower the history level to 'none', but thats shouldnt be a problem.

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

mproch — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 10:39:27 GMT

I made corrections Joram and Erik asked for, also adjusted displaying process definition version to look like in Explorer

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

jherryft — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:08:47 GMT

When will this functionnality be released? I don't see it in the roadmap.

Thanks!

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

mproch — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 18:46:01 GMT

Hi,
it's already released in Activiti 5.2. But I was too lazy/overworked to document it - sorry 😕 User guide will be updated in upcoming release

Re: Displaying process instance information in Activtit Probe

jherryft — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:56:01 GMT

Oh yes, I was with 5.1 version.
It's really great but an "autorefresh" feature would be awesome so we could follow the process progress in live! This is usefull when working with serviceTask.
Thank you for this feature anyway!