topic Specify delayTime at startup ? in Alfresco Archive

Specify delayTime at startup ?

stroobat — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:29:37 GMT

Is there an option somewhere to specify a delay time before the jobExecutor starts the polling process ?Best regards,Tom.

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

jbarrez — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:43:46 GMT

What would be the use of that?

Would an intermediate timer event in your process do the trick?

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

ronald_van_kuij — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:42:14 GMT

one reason I can think of is that other required services are not 'deployed' yet. E.g. if you have external jars with ejb's or cdi or… and those are not started yet, the jobexecutor cannot execute async services (which we do not have yet). But this is true for the engine in general.

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

stroobat — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:42:03 GMT

I use the Activiti Spring integration and from the moment that the processEngineConfiguration bean is loaded (and the jobExector is active) the polling process begins.

I have an application server that hosts different web applications that communicatie through http. My Activiti workflow uses timeEvents. Suppose
that the activiti appliction is started, a timer has reached the duedate and want to access functionallity in another application that is not yet started …

I hope my explanation is clear ?

Tom.

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

jbarrez — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:29:19 GMT

Ok, I never would have thought in that direction 🙂

The only thing I can think of (besides hacking the engine), is to define an order in the booting of your webapps (i know that JBoss can do that)

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

stroobat — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:01:47 GMT

Frameworks like Camel do support it for FTP polling …

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

frederikherema1 — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:43:27 GMT

Maybe as a workaround, you could disable the jobExecutor activating by default, and using some kind of mechanism (like a BarrierService or listener of some kind) to call the jobexecutor.start() when container is booted.

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

stroobat — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:01:29 GMT

I don't like to use permanent workarounds …
Does activiti has any plans to support this in the future ?

Should I create a Jira ticket for this ?

Tom.

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

jbarrez — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:38:13 GMT

You definitely can create a JIRA, but I'm unsure if it will end up prioritised in the coming releases.

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

stroobat — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 11:47:25 GMT

Ticket has been created:

http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/ACT-727

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

njames — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:33:45 GMT

I don't know if this scenario was outlined in this thread, but I have a similar need. I have a number of executions waiting on timer boundary events in the activiti database. When I start my activiti engine, the job executor fires some of these executions during the application start up. Unfortunately, these processes use Camel routes and my camel routes haven't started before the job executor is enabled. Hence all my stored executions crash.
I would like to have all the Camel routes and everything configured and working before the job executor comes alive.
Nick.

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

jbarrez — Mon, 27 May 2013 12:20:03 GMT

I see your problem, but I don't know if a 'delay' attribute is the solution. After all, you can never know how long it will take next time it will take for the engine to boot….

If you are using spring, as in the Jira issue above, there is a already a solution proposed which allows you to do that.

Anybody has a suggestion on how to know when the executor is safe to start?

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

jdev_hari — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 15:28:15 GMT

We are facing the issue as mentioned above in a multi-node cluster. I am thinking of a full blown solution as follows

- set jobexecutor as false in activiti configuration file
- have a topic and listener configured from every jvm
- once server starts, we will have someone click to openup the workflow engine (it places a message in topic, the listener would start the jobexecutor)

A cleaner solution would avoid having all these lot of moving parts.

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

trademak — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 08:01:20 GMT

I think that's a good solution to implement the "delay" behavior.

Best regards,

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

engywook — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 19:55:36 GMT

We went with an event-driven solution to address this problem. We're using Activiti 5.14 with Spring 3.2 and Camel 2.12. Our processes rely on Camel routes, so if the JobExecutor starts before the Camel routes have been started, then the jobs will fail.

First, I tried using Spring's SmartLifecycle to ensure the JobExecutor starts during the last phase. It did make it start in the last phase of startup, but then I realized that the Camel routes are started upon receiving Spring's ContextRefreshedEvent, which is fired after the spring context has loaded. So the JobExecutor was still starting prior to the Camel route startup. I only mention this because if you are not using Camel, then the SmartLifecycle approach may work for you.

Since we require the Camel context to have loaded completely before JobExecutor, I added a bean to start the JobExecutor upon receipt of the CamelContextStartedEvent.

<code>
<bean id="processEngineConfiguration" class="org.activiti.spring.SpringProcessEngineConfiguration">
…
<property name="jobExecutorActivate" value="false" />
<property name="jobExecutor" ref="jobExecutor"/>
…
</bean>

<bean id="jobExecutor" class="org.activiti.engine.impl.jobexecutor.DefaultJobExecutor"/>
</code>

<java>
@Named
public class JobExecutorStarter extends EventNotifierSupport {

@Inject
private JobExecutor jobExecutor;

@Override
public void notify(EventObject event) throws Exception {
if (event instanceof CamelContextStartedEvent) {
jobExecutor.start();
} else if (event instanceof CamelContextStoppingEvent) {
jobExecutor.shutdown();
}

}

@Override
public boolean isEnabled(EventObject event) {
return event instanceof CamelContextStartedEvent || event instanceof CamelContextStoppingEvent;
}

@Override
protected void doStart() throws Exception {
}

@Override
protected void doStop() throws Exception {
}

}
</java>

Re: Specify delayTime at startup ?

jbarrez — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 12:57:11 GMT

Thanks for posting this! Clean solution.