Activiti 5.22: Message-Cancelled Call Activity doesn't fire subprocess PROCESS_CANCELLED

willb — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 13:52:23 GMT

(Title originally indicated v5.18, but we are on 5.22).When a process instance ends via an end event a PROCESS_COMPLETE listener event fires. If the process hits a terminate end event PROCESS_CANCELLED fires.When that subprocess is the result of a Call Activity and the Call Activity receives a boun

Re: Activiti 5.22: Message-Cancelled Call Activity doesn't fire subprocess PROCESS_CANCELLED

willb — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 16:31:35 GMT

With no response from either Alfresco or the community regarding this question, we did arrive at a solution. That solution, however, is horribly ugly in my opinion.

What we did was add a manual input variable to every Call Actvity where the subprocess is an "order" and will contain our completeEventTrackingId. That variable is something like "parentCallActivityElementId" and contains the same ID as that Call Activity element, obviously. For example, if the element ID is "subCompleteTitleOrder", then we'll have an input variable of parentCallActivityElementId="subCompleteTitleOrder". This requires all of our BPM developers to perform this extra design step. (Yes, we could modify the XML at deployment time, but we aren't quite there yet.)

When "PROCESS_START" fires on the subprocess, we look for a process variable named "parentCallActivityElementId". If it is found, we retrieve the parent process, and create a variable that follows the convention, in this case, of subCompleteTitleOrder_pid and store the subprocess' processInstanceId on it. Note that the convention is "parent Call Activity element ID" plus underscore plus "pid" to hold that value.

When the parent Call Activity is cancelled (either by a boundary event or by the parent process being canceled), the listener point "ACTIVITY_CANCELLED" does fire for any open, unfinished elements. We check to see if it's of the Call Activity type and, if so, we grab that element ID, then look for convention-based "thatId_pid" process variable (in this case: "subCompleteTitleOrder_pid") in the containing process. If it's found, then we can grab (either from live or historical process search) for that sub-processInstanceId, look for the completeEventTrackingId variable on that subprocess... and fire our postProcessEnded() custom function that closes that task ID in the legacy system.

A couple of points here that I can see for improvement for Activiti:

When a process is cancelled, regardless of how it is spawned (Process self-terminates, Call Activiti cancelled, Parent Process is cancelled, boundary events, etc.) that PROCESS_CANCELLED is fired. In our opinion, this is a bug, that cancelled Call Activities don't fire PROCESS_CANCELLED on their spawned subprocesses.
It would nice if there was a way to be able to configure the input/output variables for a Call Activity at runtime. If there's a way, we couldn't find it.
We know that when a subprocess ends, that control is returned to the parent process and the Call Activity ends and the flow moves on. There is obviously a connection between a Call Activity and it's spawned process. But there seems to be no way at runtime to obtain the spawned sub-processInstanceId. At least not that is publicly exposed. Adding the abiltity to ask the Call Activity, when it ends, "what was the processInstanceId of the process you spawned?" would be mighty helpful. Or even to have access to the sub-process' variables would be even better, without having to specifically create an output variable, which, again, seems impossible to modify at runtime.

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Activiti 5.22: Message-Cancelled Call Activity doesn't fire subprocess PROCESS_CANCELLED

Re: Activiti 5.22: Message-Cancelled Call Activity doesn't fire subprocess PROCESS_CANCELLED