candidateStarterGroups and custom user & group tables

[edwinvds]

Hi,

We have just migrated from the built in user & group tables ( act_id_user & act_id_group ) to our own set of tables. After the migration I noticed that the candidateStarterGroup functionality no longer works, which worked fine before the migration. This functionality allows you to tag the BPMN process with the activiti attribute  activiti:candidateStarterGroups , as explained here http://activiti.org/userguide/#security

Using a BPMN process element:

   

<process activiti:candidateStarterGroups="mygroup" id="myprocess" name="My Process">‍

And given a user named "user1", member of "mygroup" , the following code would return the expected process definition, but no longer does:

    //org.activiti.engine.RepositoryService
    repositoryService 
        .createProcessDefinitionQuery()
        .startableByUser("user1")
        .list();‍‍‍‍‍

I've narrowed it down to the query defined in ProcessDefinition.xml , which is joining the wrong user and group tables :

      <if test="authorizationUserId != null">
        AND (exists (select ID_  from ${prefix} ACT_RU_IDENTITYLINK  IDN where IDN.PROC_DEF_ID_ = RES.ID_ and IDN.USER_ID_ = #{authorizationUserId})
             OR exists (select IDN.ID_  from ${prefix} ACT_RU_IDENTITYLINK  IDN,  ${prefix} ACT_ID_MEMBERSHIP MBMR where IDN.PROC_DEF_ID_ = RES.ID_ and MBMR.USER_ID_ =  #{authorizationUserId} and IDN.GROUP_ID_ = MBMR.GROUP_ID_)
             )
      </if>
‍‍‍‍‍‍

     
So my question is twofold:

• is this a bug or a feature ?


• what is the best way to override the built in query, without patching Activiti ?

Thanks,
Edwin

[frederikherema1]

Hi edwin. The "starter" functionality was added recently to activiti and it seems it's not completely identity-implementation agnostic, as it should be. So this is a *feature*

When querying for tasks 'assigned to user', for example , this is done using 2 queries: one for fetching user's groups and a second query fetching the actual task, using the returned group-ID's. So this approach should be applied to the candidateStarterGroup I guess, in order to fix the issue you're facing. I'm afraid you're currently obligated to patch the activiti codebase/jar you're using right now to overcome/replace the join with membership-table.

Issue created in JIRA: https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/ACT-1416

[edwinvds]

Hi Frederik,

Thanks for the quick response. I might just wait for the 'feature' to be updated .

cheers,
Edwin.