topic Re: AND condition on candidateGroup? in Alfresco Archive

AND condition on candidateGroup?

petter_f — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 18:41:06 GMT

Hi all,I need some assistance in how to achieve AND conditions on groups. Our business requirements are basically that in some cases it is enough that the user has one of the stated groups (as in activiti:candidateGroups), in some cases they need to belong to both. As far as my understanding of Acti

Re: AND condition on candidateGroup?

frederikherema1 — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:25:17 GMT

The activiti:candidateGroup is just a shorthand for the verbose BPMN2.0 way of defining candidates for a user-task. In this syntax, no AND/OR semantics are present, so it's unlikely this attribute will be adjusted to the use-case you describe.

An approach you *could* take is to use a BPMNParseListener to alter the values of the candidates on the user-taks and further down in the implementation, use an altered version of the task-query that is used… However, this will require some digging into the activiti-code.

Another approach would be to have "special" groups, e.g. of a candidate-expression: "group(group1&group2), group(group3)".
By default, the expression will resolve to 2 groups: "group1&group2" and "group3". In activiti, this means part of "group1&group2" or "group3". Now, if you alter the identity-management to return these "special" groups as "groups a user belongs to", activiti will show the task as claimable by someone in group1 and group2.

Offcourse, this means a user gets a lot of extra special groups, when part of a lot of "normal" groups. So some kind or "restricting" mechanism should be created to only make special groups for well-known groups which are likely to be used in "AND" semantics…

Re: AND condition on candidateGroup?

petter_f — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:36:03 GMT

Thanks for the response Frederik,

I think I will have to go along the lines of the second approach you mention. Need to have a discussion with the business side in order to minimize the number of special occasions.

Hopefully someday the AND condition on groups will be supported in bpmn. The truth of the matter is that I am in reality modeling teams and skills as groups in Activity, and the need for AND conditions arises from this fact….Maybe I simply need to implement this on the "outside", but I was looking for a way to do it directly in Activity since I am a bit concerned about performance issues when doing it programtically in my own code…

Regards,
/Petter

Re: AND condition on candidateGroup?

jbarrez — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:07:12 GMT

I actually think we should have support for expression in there …

So I created http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/ACT-1448