topic Re: Activiti Process Versioning: Best Practices in Alfresco Archive

Activiti Process Versioning: Best Practices

sangv — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 14:56:38 GMT

Please redirect me to another post if this question has already been asked.Context: We are using activiti in an environment that follows versioning. So when an application gets deployed for the first time, it will ship out with version 1.0 of business processes and rules. In the future, we may deplo

Re: Activiti Process Versioning: Best Practices

jbarrez — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:33:31 GMT

It depends on your strategy with 'older' processes.
By default, when you deploy a process definition with the same key, this process will get the previous version + 1.
All process started using the startProcessInstanceByKey() method will now use the latest version, while the 'old ones' are phased out.

The other approach is to do it yourself in the key … but that would also mean that you will have to change the code that calls these processes every time you do an update.

Re: Activiti Process Versioning: Best Practices

sangv — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:27:54 GMT

Thanks for the reply.

We would be potentially working with long-running processes that can take more than a year to complete (our processes are in the banking/mortgage industry). So our approach for older process is to keep them running for users that have already started on them. For new users that are getting into the process, we will have a versioning strategy that determines if they are eligible for the new process or the old process. What this means for us is that we cannot 'phase old' older processes. With this being our usecase, is looking up the correct process definition version with processDefinitionId still the best approach? Is there an injection point to custom create our processDefinitionId after deployment that is intelligible to the application (meaning can we inject a naming strategy/convention to the BPMNDeployer)?

Thanks,
Sang

Re: Activiti Process Versioning: Best Practices

jbarrez — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 08:54:43 GMT

If I understand it correctly, why can't you just use the key for the purpose you describe?
Since you do the check which process to start at the beginning, the key is perfectly useable for that.