topic Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task in Alfresco Archive

Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

gaston — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 21:41:31 GMT

Hi all, I'm having problems calling a Spring autowired Repository from a task. The idea is to have the Service Task call one of the methods of a Service. Problem is, after executing the service task, I'm getting an "Unknown property in expression" if using a delegateExpression (similar to what's men

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

frederikherema1 — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:04:33 GMT

Do your spring-services work with the auto wiring, called from outside activiti-context?

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

gaston — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:11:38 GMT

Thanks for your reply, and yes, we're calling the same services from another webapp without issues. I even ran a couple of test cases trying to persist an entity, calling directly the services from within the Activiti Explorer project without issues.

IMO, problem seems to be the autowiring not being done when calling the beans from the activiti engine, which I'm guessing is a mistake I'm making when configuring the engine (not manually wiring the beans perhaps?)

Regards,

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

frederikherema1 — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:03:07 GMT

When the ProcessEngineFactoryBeans is called, it passes on the application-context that is provided by spring into the expression-manager as-is. So no special handling is done with this context, so I'm sure the problems lies within the context initialization itself.

How do you extract the engine from the context?

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

gaston — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 21:55:48 GMT

Sorry for the late reply. I'm currently not extracting the engine from the context (just loading the process in Activiti explorer and calling the execute method). Is there something else I should be doing?

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

gaston — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:57:17 GMT

Ok, an update.

My problem seems to be related to Vaadin, as seen here.

I've noticed that when comparing a web project (which includes the same jar with the Spring annotated Services as the one I'm having trouble autowiring in Activiti Explorer2 app) and noticed I was missing this on the web.xml file:


<context-param>
  <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
  <param-value>
      classpath*:applicationContext.xml
     </param-value>
</context-param>

As soon as I add that, the Explorer fails to start and I'm greeted with:


org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No unique bean of type [org.activiti.explorer.ExplorerApp] is defined: expected single bean but found 0: 
 at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory.getBean(DefaultListableBeanFactory.java:276)

Digging through the code, and following the advice on the previous SO thread, I'm fairly certain that ExplorerApplicationServlet should be dealing with this without any problems. I'm a complete noob and haven't touched anything Vaadin related in the past, so perhaps I'm missing something else entirely?

Thanks for your time (and patience )

Gaston

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

jbarrez — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 08:29:20 GMT

You also need activiti-ui-context.xml to be included, that's where the ExplorerApp bean is defined.

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

gaston — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 12:03:53 GMT

You also need activiti-ui-context.xml to be included, that's where the ExplorerApp bean is defined.

Here's my applicationContext.xml :


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
        xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx" xmlns:jee="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee"

        xsi:schemaLocation="
                        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
                http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.1.xsd
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.1.xsd
                        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
                        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.1.xsd
                        http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc
                        http://www.springframework.org/schema/jdbc/spring-jdbc-3.1.xsd
                        http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee
                        http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee/spring-jee-3.1.xsd">

        <!– <import resource="classpath*:/activiti.cfg.xml" /> –>
        <import resource="classpath*:/applicationContextCore.xml" />
        <context:smileytongue:roperty-placeholder location="classpath*:jdbc.properties" />

        <!– Scan this classpath for annotated components that will be auto-registered
                as Spring beans –>
        <context:annotation-config />
        <context:spring-configured />

        <context:component-scan base-package="edu.bedelias.*" />

        <bean
                class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.support.PersistenceAnnotationBeanPostProcessor" />

        <!– Automatically translate hibernate/jpa exceptions into Spring's generic
                DataAccessException hierarchy for those classes annotated with Repository –>
        <bean
                class="org.springframework.dao.annotation.PersistenceExceptionTranslationPostProcessor" />

        <!– JPA Entity Manager Factory –>
        <bean id="entityManagerFactory"
                class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
                <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
                <property name="jpaVendorAdapter" ref="hibernateJpaVendorAdapter" />
                <property name="packagesToScan">
                        <list>
                                <value>edu.bedelias.*</value>
                        </list>
                </property>
                <property name="jpaProperties">
                        <props>
                                <!– set HibernateJpaVendorAdapter's behavior: 'create' = build a new
                                        DB on each run; 'update' = modify an existing database; 'create-drop' = 'create'
                                        and also drops tables when Hibernate closes; 'validate' = makes no changes
                                        to the database –>
                                <prop key="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto">create-drop</prop>
                        </props>
                </property>
        </bean>

        <bean id="hibernateJpaVendorAdapter"
                class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter">
                <property name="showSql" value="true" />
                <property name="generateDdl" value="false" />
                <property name="databasePlatform" value="org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect" />
        </bean>

        <bean id="dataSource" class="com.mchange.v2.c3p0.ComboPooledDataSource"
                destroy-method="close">
                <property name="driverClass" value="${jdbc.driverClass}" />
                <property name="jdbcUrl" value="${jdbc.jdbcUrl}" />
                <property name="user" value="${jdbc.user}" />
                <property name="password" value="${jdbc.password}" />
                <property name="maxPoolSize" value="${jdbc.maxPoolSize}" />
                <property name="maxStatements" value="${jdbc.maxStatements}" />
                <property name="minPoolSize" value="${jdbc.minPoolSize}" />
        </bean>

        <!– Transaction Manager is defined –>
        <bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager">
                <property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="entityManagerFactory" />
                <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
        </bean>

        <!– Hijack the current @Session scope annotation on each @Service and make
                it last only for the duration of the thread –>
        <bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.CustomScopeConfigurer">
                <property name="scopes">
                        <map>
                                <entry key="session">
                                        <bean class="org.springframework.context.support.SimpleThreadScope" />
                                </entry>
                        </map>
                </property>
        </bean>

        <!– Enable the configuration of transactional behavior based on annotations –>
        <tx:annotation-driven />

        <!– <bean id="dbProperties" –>
        <!– class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer"> –>
        <!– <property name="location" value="classpath:db.properties" /> –>
        <!– Allow other PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer to run as well –>
        <!– <property name="ignoreUnresolvablePlaceholders" value="true" /> –>
        <!– </bean> –>

        <bean id="demoDataGenerator" class="org.activiti.explorer.demo.DemoDataGenerator">
                <property name="processEngine" ref="processEngine" />
        </bean>

        <bean id="processEngineConfiguration" class="org.activiti.spring.SpringProcessEngineConfiguration">
                <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
                <property name="transactionManager" ref="transactionManager" />
                <property name="databaseSchemaUpdate" value="true" />
                <property name="jobExecutorActivate" value="true" />
                <property name="customFormTypes">
                        <list>
                                <ref bean="userFormType" />
                        </list>
                </property>
        </bean>

        <bean id="processEngine" class="org.activiti.spring.ProcessEngineFactoryBean"
                destroy-method="destroy">
                <property name="processEngineConfiguration" ref="processEngineConfiguration" />
        </bean>

        <bean id="repositoryService" factory-bean="processEngine"
                factory-method="getRepositoryService" />
        <bean id="runtimeService" factory-bean="processEngine"
                factory-method="getRuntimeService" />
        <bean id="taskService" factory-bean="processEngine"
                factory-method="getTaskService" />
        <bean id="historyService" factory-bean="processEngine"
                factory-method="getHistoryService" />
        <bean id="managementService" factory-bean="processEngine"
                factory-method="getManagementService" />
        <bean id="identityService" factory-bean="processEngine"
                factory-method="getIdentityService" />

        <bean id="activitiLoginHandler" class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.login.DefaultLoginHandler">
                <property name="identityService" ref="identityService" />
        </bean>

        <!– Include the UI-related wiring. This UI context will be used in the
                alfresco activiti admin UI –>
        <import resource="activiti-ui-context.xml" />

        <!– Custom form types –>
        <bean id="userFormType" class="org.activiti.explorer.form.UserFormType" />

</beans>

I've left the import of the activiti-ui-context.xml as in the sample file, does it need to be included somewhere else?

Just in case, here's the web.xml


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
        id="WebApp_ID" version="2.5">
        <display-name>Vaadin Web Application</display-name>

        <context-param>
                <description>Vaadin production mode</description>
                <param-name>productionMode</param-name>
                <param-value>true</param-value>
        </context-param>

<!– with this context-param Activiti explorer won't start –>
        <context-param> 
                <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
                <param-value>
              classpath*:applicationContext.xml
<!– should I be including the activiti-ui-context here? –>
                </param-value>
        </context-param>

  <!– To load the Spring context –>
  <listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
  </listener>
 
  <!– To allow session-scoped beans in Spring –>
  <listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextListener</listener-class>
  </listener>
 
        <servlet>
                <servlet-name>Vaadin Application Servlet</servlet-name>
                <servlet-class>org.activiti.explorer.servlet.ExplorerApplicationServlet</servlet-class>
        </servlet>
       
        <servlet-mapping>
                <servlet-name>Vaadin Application Servlet</servlet-name>
                <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
        </servlet-mapping>

        <!– Session timeout on one day –>
        <session-config>
                <session-timeout>480</session-timeout>
        </session-config>


</web-app>

As per the activiti-ui-context.xml file, I just modified the param ${activiti.ui.environment} for 'activiti', the rest remains unchanged.
Here's the code:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans
        xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
        xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
        xmlns:jee="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee"
        xsi:schemaLocation="
                http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
                http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.1.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.1.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.1.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee/spring-jee-3.1.xsd">

  <bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer" name="activitiUiPropertyPlaceholder">
    <property name="location" value="classpath:ui.properties" />
    <!– Allow other PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer to run as well –>
    <property name="ignoreUnresolvablePlaceholders" value="true"/>
  </bean>

  <!– Global scoped beans –>
 
  <bean name="navigatorManager" class="org.activiti.explorer.navigation.NavigatorManager" />
 
  <bean name="attachmentRendererManager" class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.content.AttachmentRendererManager" />
   
  <!– Custom form property renderers can be plugged in here –>
  <bean id="formPropertyRendererManager" class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.FormPropertyRendererManager" lazy-init="true">
    <!– Default renderer –>
    <property name="noTypePropertyRenderer">
      <bean class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.StringFormPropertyRenderer" />
    </property>
    <!– Renderers by property type –>
    <property name="propertyRenderers">
      <list>
        <bean class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.StringFormPropertyRenderer" />
        <bean class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.EnumFormPropertyRenderer" />
        <bean class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.LongFormPropertyRenderer" />
        <bean class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.DateFormPropertyRenderer" />
        <bean class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.UserFormPropertyRenderer" />
        <bean class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.form.BooleanFormPropertyRenderer" />
      </list>
    </property>
  </bean>
 
  <!– Variable value rendering –>
  <bean id="variableRendererManager" class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.variable.VariableRendererManager" />
 
  <bean name="componentFactories" class="org.activiti.explorer.ComponentFactories">
    <property name="environment" value="activiti" />
  </bean>

<!– value="${activiti.ui.environment} –>
 
  <!– User cache usage depends on environment, hence the faactory approach –>
  <bean name="userCache" class="org.activiti.explorer.cache.UserCacheFactoryBean">
    <property name="environment" value="activiti" />
  </bean>
 
<!–   ${activiti.ui.environment} –>
 
  <!– Session scoped UI beans –>
 
  <bean name="navigationFragmentChangeListener" class="org.activiti.explorer.navigation.NavigationFragmentChangeListener" scope="session">
    <property name="navigatorManager" ref="navigatorManager" />
  </bean>
 
  <bean name="mainWindow" class="org.activiti.explorer.ui.MainWindow" scope="session">
    <property name="navigationFragmentChangeListener" ref="navigationFragmentChangeListener" />
    <property name="i18nManager" ref="i18nManager" />
  </bean>
 
<!–   ${activiti.ui.environment} –>
  <bean name="explorerApp" class="org.activiti.explorer.ExplorerApp" scope="session">
    <property name="environment" value="activiti" />
    <property name="userCache" ref="userCache" />
    <property name="i18nManager" ref="i18nManager" />
    <property name="viewManager" ref="viewManager" />
    <property name="notificationManager" ref="notificationManager" />
    <property name="attachmentRendererManager" ref="attachmentRendererManager" />
    <property name="formPropertyRendererManager" ref="formPropertyRendererManager" />
    <property name="variableRendererManager" ref="variableRendererManager" />
    <property name="applicationMainWindow" ref="mainWindow" />
    <property name="componentFactories" ref="componentFactories" />
    <property name="loginHandler" ref="activitiLoginHandler" />
  </bean>
 
  <bean name="i18nManager" class="org.activiti.explorer.I18nManager" scope="session" />
 
  <bean name="notificationManager" class="org.activiti.explorer.NotificationManager" scope="session">
    <property name="mainWindow" ref="mainWindow" />
    <property name="i18nManager" ref="i18nManager" />
  </bean>
 
  <bean name="viewManager" class="org.activiti.explorer.ViewManagerFactoryBean" scope="session">
    <property name="mainWindow" ref="mainWindow" />
    <property name="environment" value="activiti" />
  </bean>
<!–   ${activiti.ui.environment} –>

</beans>

Thanks,

Edit:

Somewhat related?
http://forums.activiti.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4741

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

jbarrez — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 12:37:20 GMT

Yet again, I don't see you importing the activiti-ui-context.xml anywhere in your root applicationContext.xml?

Am I reading it that bad? Can you paste the section where you do it?

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

gaston — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:14:59 GMT

Yet again, I don't see you importing the activiti-ui-context.xml anywhere in your root applicationContext.xml?

Am I reading it that bad? Can you paste the section where you do it?

It's right there


<!– Include the UI-related wiring. This UI context will be used in the
      alfresco activiti admin UI –>
   <import resource="activiti-ui-context.xml" />

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

jbarrez — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 12:08:27 GMT

Okay, that is pretty embarrassing ….

Anyway … I really don't see anything wrong: You've got a SpringEngineConfiguration, you've enabled component scan for the service. So it should just do what it's supposed to do.

Does the service task is in the right package (probably you've already checked that …).

We've got tests in our test suite (module activiti-spring) that test the delegateExpression in Spring. Since that test still runs green, it should work as advertised :s

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

gaston — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 13:08:33 GMT

Yeah, I'm at a loss here. Seems I can't get Vaadin to work nicely with the Spring servlet, just like this guy.

If everything else fails, I'll resort to RMI/Http Invoker to call my services from Activiti Explorer, as suggested here 😕

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

jbarrez — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 08:24:53 GMT

Would you be able to push your code somewhere (my preference goes to GitHub 😉 )?

That way, I can take a look, because it's an important thing of Explorer to be able to add in new service tasks on the fly.

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

gaston — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 11:39:35 GMT

Would you be able to push your code somewhere (my preference goes to GitHub 😉 )?

That way, I can take a look, because it's an important thing of Explorer to be able to add in new service tasks on the fly.

I'll make a "just the basics" sample with our configuration and push it to GitHub later today.

And again, I can't thank you enough for your time regarding this.

Regards,

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

gaston — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 14:50:02 GMT

Ok, sorry for the delay. This took me a while but finally was able to solve it.

This is how it ended up working:


ClassPathXmlApplicationContext cpx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("classpath:applicationContextActiviti.xml");
TestServiceDummy = (TestServiceDummy) cpx.getBean("testServiceDummy");

I use this within the JavaDelegate/Class that gets called by the task, "applicationContextActiviti" is a custom appContext config file with the TestServiceDummy service manually declared.

This is because from Activiti Explorer I did not have visibility over Spring Beans (unless you get your hands dirty with Vaadin that is) so what I did was to skip the @Autowired on the class attribute and use the old manual approach to beans, then load them from within the caller class. From there on, all autowiring works.

Thanks so much for your time, please let me know if you still want that sample uploaded to GitHub.

Regards,

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

jbarrez — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:02:25 GMT

Ok, I understand how that works.

Still, I think we should support having beans defined in the applicationContext files that are already there.

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

wsalembi — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 10:00:19 GMT

Gaston is right, but I think he left out an important detail. Autowiring does not work within unit tests with org.activiti.engine.test.ActivitiRule. We had an issue with our spring beans not being autowired in our unit tests too.

Our activiti.cfg.xml file contains <code><context:annotation-config/></code>
We call a JavaDelegate class using activiti:delegateExpression

<code> <serviceTask id="checkValidName" name="CheckValidName" activiti:delegateExpression="${nameChecker}"></serviceTask></code>

The cause of the problem is ActivitiRule who delegates to org.activiti.engine.impl.cfg.BeansConfigurationHelper:arseProcessEngineConfiguration to instantiate the spring context using DefaultListableBeanFactory. Because no ApplicationContext is used, the <code><context:annotation-config/></code> seems to be ignored.

(BeanFactory only supports the older Autowire collaborators mechanism. http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.0.RELEASE/reference/htmlsingle/#beans-factory-autowire)

If we instantiate the Spring context ourselves in the unit test using ClassPathXmlApplicationContext, we have no issues with autowiring.

Is it possible to review the implementation of BeansConfigurationHelper to use an application context instead of beanFactory?

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

frederikherema1 — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 12:46:07 GMT

@wsalembi that definitely makes sense. Feel free to create a pull-request or share how you would handle the change for this on our codebase…

Re: Problem with Spring autowiring within a Service Task

wsalembi — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 18:55:12 GMT

Hi Frederik, I fixed it in the activiti-engine module. New test created and no impact in the other tests detected

https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/pull/100

Willem Salembier