topic Re: Modelling question: Multiple contributors to activity in Alfresco Archive

Modelling question: Multiple contributors to activity

michaelfranz — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 06:32:44 GMT

Activiti newbie question (apologies if this is the wrong forum):An activity (a "Job") involves collecting data pertaining to the quality of physical artefacts. The quality of said artefacts is determined by human inspection.When a Job is defined by a "Job Manager", the artefact type, total quantity

Re: Modelling question: Multiple contributors to activity

frederikherema1 — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 08:58:30 GMT

If you have the same task that should be repeated X times (potentially, but not required;, by different users) you can use the multi-instance approach (see user guide). If its more than a single "activity" that needs to be repeated, you can bundle all the work in a sub-process and repeat that.

If you want to have the abortion of a job be based on the outcome of the user-task, you can indeed use a exl-gateway after a user-task. When the job should be aborted, you can thow an Error-event, for example. In case you're "job-process" is wrapped in a sub-process, you can add a catching-error-boundary-event to the sub-process. When one user sends a request to "cancel" the job, the whole sub-process is terminated and the process moves on to the activity you have modeled after the "boundary event" (potentially process-end or a special user-task).

Re: Modelling question: Multiple contributors to activity

michaelfranz — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 14:00:03 GMT

Terrific info. Many thanks.

A couple of points re your first suggestion:

It's not so much a "repeated task". It's more like one or more users contribute participate on a single task.

However, having done a little bit of reading around this in the past hours (see section "Multiple Resource Patterns" at http://www.workflowpatterns.com/patterns/resource/), I now have the feeling that this should be modelled differently to what I first envisaged and I suspect this is probably what you're getting at: The main process deals with the "Job". This is assigned to a Job Manager and stays that way until completion. It's execution results in the instantiation of 1..n "Inspections" with one inspection per Inspector. I guess this could be a subprocess [comments welcome]. Once each or the Inspection subprocesses are completed - or aborted - the main process can complete.

Finally, I presume all this can be expressed using the Activiti Designer. I must confess I'm finding the tool a bit clunky (on Mac at least), but that might be down to inexperience.

Apols for the undoubted misuse of the terminology… new territory.

Re: Modelling question: Multiple contributors to activity

jbarrez — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 14:27:15 GMT

If the tool feel clunky somehow, please create Jira issues accordingly so we can fix them. That too, is contributing to open source!