topic Re: Re-running a workflow for a business key in Alfresco Archive

Re-running a workflow for a business key

jenguran — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:24:32 GMT

If I have a workflow with key "Workflow A" and a business entity named "My Customer", start a process instance for them and then cancel it, trying to restart it throws an error because of ACT_UNIQ_HI_BUS_KEY. The same thing happens if I run through the workflow for them and then try to run it again.

Re: Re-running a workflow for a business key

frederikherema1 — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 07:13:29 GMT

Hi,

The idea of the business-key is to have your own unique identifier for a process-instance (be it historic or not), independant of the ID's in activiti. So when a process has been started with that ID ever (and history isn't turned off), it cannot be started again.

If you really want to reuse a certain business-key (eg. due to cancelation of process), you should first delete the historic process instance (HistoryService.deleteHistoricProcessInstance()), this will remove all history data.

Re: Re-running a workflow for a business key

ronald_van_kuij — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 07:44:10 GMT

Hi,

The idea of the business-key is to have your own unique identifier for a process-instance (be it historic or not), independant of the ID's in activiti. So when a process has been started with that ID ever (and history isn't turned off), it cannot be started again.

If you really want to reuse a certain business-key (eg. due to cancelation of process), you should first delete the historic process instance (HistoryService.deleteHistoricProcessInstance()), this will remove all history data.

Maybe there should be some relaxation in this. Think e.g. About te case where you have a car damage repair process. Using the licenseplate number or the chassis number is logical then, but a car can have damage multiple times. Deleting history would make bam things hard.

Re: Re-running a workflow for a business key

frederikherema1 — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:58:14 GMT

Than it's best to just use a process-variable for this I guess (querying for those is possible too, so can be used exactly the same as business-key). I thought this was more of identifying a process with a single (and unique) identifier within your own app. So the license-plate fits better in variables I suppose

Re: Re-running a workflow for a business key

ronald_van_kuij — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:39:03 GMT

Yes, my example is not correct (it was early) . It seems to have been the intention of the businesskey to reference a unique instance in the domain model. So it should be a dossier number which is to be unique. Just like I aaaaaaaaalways advocated that past years 🙂

Querying by variable is something I never did. Since if you share the engine in different apps and have requirements to find instances based on different types of variables, the number of indexes explodes and performance crumbles if you have no other option to limit the search first (e.g. processname). So we 'always' did that in the domain model.

Re: Re-running a workflow for a business key

jenguran — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:55:31 GMT

Cool, thanks for the answers. I'll switch to using a process-variable instead.