Activiti support for 'signal event type' and 'service task'?

[kevin1]

Hello,

I am very curious about the Activiti releases as we - as a research institute - want to use it in one of our student projects. But I have some questions about the support of Activiti for some standard BPMN 2.0 elements that would be very important for us:

1. Signal event type: event thrown from outside the process (on a publish/subscribe basis) and catched by the process to decide on the further process flow
2. Service task with web services: we'd like to invoke a web service from the process with late binding, i.e. decision on binding to the concrete web service endpoint not until execution time

Does Activiti support these two BPMN 2.0 elements already or is it at least planned for the near future? We need to decide whether to use Activiti in our current student project or not.

If there is no direct support, does anyone have an idea how to overcome this problem? We could e.g. use other BPMN 2.0 elements as a workaround which would not be an optimal sollution. Is there a (simple) possibility to add these elements to Activiti (by us), as I read in your features that you will support custom activity types? Does this also count for (custom) event types?

Thanks a lot for your help!

Best,
Kevin

[jbarrez]

Hi Kevin,

The signal event type is not planned for a close release. My take is that it will probably be implemented after the November release.

The webservice call is planned for the November release. You should be seeing traces if it in the coming weeks.


A webservice invocation should easily be implemented as a custom Java service task.
The signal is a bit more difficult, but still possible, involving also a custom java class and a queue + listener. The only downside of that, is that it wouldn't be shown in the diagram as the specific event type, but as a regular task.

[kevin1]

Thanks a lot for yor quick answer! This sounds very good for our student project…

Best,
Kevin