topic Error forcing a timer event in a test case in Alfresco Archive

Error forcing a timer event in a test case

brianshowers — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 18:40:33 GMT

I'm trying to write an automated test case to simulate the behavior of some timers that are in my process diagram. However, whenever I call managementService.executeJob(), I get an "already taking a transition" exception. Is there something else that I need to do? I'm currently using Activiti 5.1

Re: Error forcing a timer event in a test case

jbarrez — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 08:28:11 GMT

Did you configure your process engine with the job executor enabled? That might cause the exception you see.

Re: Error forcing a timer event in a test case

brianshowers — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:04:00 GMT

I don't think that's the problem. I added the following two lines to my test case to verify


boolean active = ((ProcessEngineImpl) processEngine).getProcessEngineConfiguration().getJobExecutor().isActive();
Assert.assertTrue(active);

With the new version of the test, I still get the same exception when calling executeJob()


@Test
@Deployment
public void myTimerTestExample() {
    //Unfortunately, the ProcessEngine interface doesn't expose the JobExecutor
    //So we are forced to cast to the implementation
    boolean active = ((ProcessEngineImpl) processEngine).getProcessEngineConfiguration().getJobExecutor().isActive();
    Assert.assertTrue(active);

    //Start a new process instance
    String processDefinitionKey = "mykey";
    ProcessInstance instance = runtimeService.startProcessInstanceByKey(processDefinitionKey);
    String processInstanceId = instance.getProcessInstanceId();

    //Find the timer job.  For this process, there is exactly one timer job which is always started
    Job timerJob = managementService.createJobQuery().processInstanceId(processInstanceId).singleResult();
    Assert.assertNotNull(timerJob );

    //Force the timer to fire
    managementService.executeJob(timerJob.getId());

    //TODO: Validate the results of the timer executing
}

Re: Error forcing a timer event in a test case

brianshowers — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 23:12:56 GMT

I think I found the issue. It's related to upgrading from Activiti 5.10 to 5.11. The issue was that the timer I was firing sent a signal that tried to kill the process that owned it. In v5.10, it appears that this was acceptable. A sub-process could send a signal to cancel itself. It appears that is no longer possible as of v5.11. If a sub-process sends a signal that cancels itself, you'll get these exceptions.

Is that expected behavior or a bug in the latest release?

Re: Error forcing a timer event in a test case

frederikherema1 — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:03:31 GMT

Using a timer-event to trigger a signal to cancel the sub-process that OWNS the timer is not something that you want to do. The fact that it worked on 5.10 is probably an implementation detail.

Why don't you let the timer-boundary event be placed on the subprocess-boundary and have interrupt the subprocess ("cancelActivity=true")?