topic Re: Email Task Exceptions in Alfresco Archive

Email Task Exceptions

conradi — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 15:14:33 GMT

Hi,The email task is a quite useful simple task - however, I think in it's current form it is hardly usable in a productive environment: any failure (be it a missing / invalid email address or a failure on the server side) is propagated as exception to the workflow, where it cannot be handled gracef

Re: Email Task Exceptions

jbarrez — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 11:48:38 GMT

Well the answer is typical: when a jira is created we can follow up on it, weighted against other priorities. To be fair, expanding the mail task is not something that's currently high on that list.

You say that you have a custom delegate, one thing that would speed up tremendously is if you can share that through a pull request. That way, you're sure it's added quickly to the code. Of course we are here to assist with that and where everything should go etc.

Re: Email Task Exceptions

conradi — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 11:13:46 GMT

I am aware, that the priorities have to be weighted.
And my post can be read as a question if it makes sense at all to send possible patches.

Unfortunately, I can't use github, but can of course give a patch which modifies the MailActivityBehavior in such a way, that no exception is thrown, but instead the error info is written into process variables (added as attachment, the patch is against 5.11, but should apply against 5.13)

Re: Email Task Exceptions

frederikherema1 — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 09:22:02 GMT

The patch uses the "set variable instead of fail" behavior always. Existing users can depend on the error occurring and might have other ways of retying/error-handling (e.g. Using async=true on email-activities and use job-mechanism for retrying/error-trapping). We can only accept this patch if the existing behavior is (by default) kept and the "new" behavior can be turned on using configuration on the XML…

Re: Email Task Exceptions

abentan — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 21:03:51 GMT

Hi, in my opinion this problem is critical, simply the system crash in production environment if any problem with the mail server happens, or even more, if only one recipient of the email is not a current email address in the server. I had to change the MailActivityBehavior also, commenting:
[java]
throw new ActivitiException("Could not send e-mail", e);
[/java]
and adding:
[java]
logger.warn("Could not send email:" + e.getMessage());
logger.debug("", e);
[/java]

Re: Email Task Exceptions

trademak — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 15:28:24 GMT

I would welcome an additional Activiti attribute where you define if you want the task to fail if the mail could not be sent. And based on this attribute you could change the exception throw to a logging statement like you did.

Best regards,

Re: Email Task Exceptions

conradi — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 13:40:16 GMT

Coming back to an old topic.
We are currently upgrading our 5.11 codebase to use the current 5.15.1 release, and I would like to get rid of the mail patch.

When speaking of 'activiti attribute' do you mean something like:

<code>
<serviceTask id="sendMail" activiti:type="mail" activiti:throwMailException="false">
</code>

or something like:

<code>
<extensionElements>
    <activiti:field name="throwException" expression="false" />
</extensionElements>
</code>

But even more important, in my previous patch I wrote the information about the exception into a process variable, so that it can be used later in the workflow, e.g. by a gateway:

<java>
private void handleException(ActivityExecution execution, String msg, Exception e) {
    log.log(Level.SEVERE, msg, e);
    execution.setVariable("EMAIL_ERROR", Boolean.TRUE);
    execution.setVariable("EMAIL_ERROR_MSG", msg);
}
</java>

Would that be acceptable?

Re: Email Task Exceptions

conradi — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 09:14:42 GMT

I created a new patch (including new tests) based on the assumption that the configuration is done with an extensionElement.
The old behavior is only changed when ignoreException is explicitly activated.

Re: Email Task Exceptions

trademak — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 14:01:10 GMT

Thanks for the patch. Applied it with some small changes in the following commit:

https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/commit/4b17821b1687ed671ee71f798099f48d8abe6efb

Best regards,

Re: Email Task Exceptions

conradi — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 15:10:42 GMT

Thanks a lot!

Re: Email Task Exceptions

conradi — Mon, 05 May 2014 09:15:10 GMT

I have realized that the user documentation needs an update too and have attached a patch.

Re: Email Task Exceptions

trademak — Tue, 06 May 2014 14:01:47 GMT

Thanks, I've applied the patch.

Best regards,