Complete (including subprocesses) process history

[mlegnani]

I'm trying to implement what I suppose to be a very simple and common functionality for my application: the complete (including subprocesses) process history of a process that is not completed. This could be very useful to the user, making him understand what happened before.

I'm realizing that its very difficult to implement since:

* there is no way to obtain the processInstanceId of a completed subprocess (while the parent process is still alive) from the callActivity that generated it from the API;
* I then looked the DB schema trying to implement that functionality by myself but I discovered that such data is not kept in activiti tables. Once completed the subprocess is removed from runtime tables and remains only in history tables but act_ru_execution has a super_exec_ field allowing to know which is the parent, while there is no such information in any historic table (am I right?);
* I decided to add a new custom table to keep track of the parent-child relation in historic tables, adding an executionListener to populate it on start of any subprocess but then I read on the forum http://forums.activiti.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1353 that using API in listeners is discouraged since "You shouldn't use activiti API from within TaskListeners (nor from ExecutionListeners or JavaDelegates), this can mess up transactions.". So I can't know the parent process since I cannot use a simple line like:

ProcessInstanc parentProcess = runtimeService.createProcessInstanceQuery().subProcessInstanceId(execution.getProcessInstanceId()).list().get(0);‍

Am I right?

Does anybody have any suggestion to solve my problem?
Thanks,
Massimo

[trademak]

Hi,

I understand the issue. What you could do is set the process instance id of the callActivity as a process variable. With the in and out parameters construction you can provide input and output parameters for a call activity like:

<callActivity id="test" calledElement="testProcess">
  <extensionElements>
    <activiti:in source="test" target="test2" />
    <activitiut source="test2" target="test" />
</extensionElements>
</callActivity>

Then you can easily connect the two processes.

Best regards,

[campa]

Hi guys,

I have modified activity engine, adding superProcessInstanceId to the HistoricProcessInstanceEntity .

So you can query historic process instances using syntax like:
historyService.createHistoricProcessInstanceQuery().superProcessInstanceId(ID).list();It seems working, you can find a svn diff file attached ( created using the 5.6 tag revision ) so the team can ( if it likes this feature ) insert it into next releases.

I have added a simple unit test, to test it. Tested only with H2 db, but probably it work also with others dbms …

Hoper this helps you.

Bye
Stefano
Tinvention.net

[trademak]

Hi,

The change looks good and is certainly something we can add.
Although, we also need an upgrade script like the ones you can find in activiti-engine/src/main/resources/org/activiti/db/upgrade.
If you can add those also in a diff script then I can try to integrate it into trunk.

Thanks,

[campa]

Hi,

The change looks good and is certainly something we can add.
Although, we also need an upgrade script like the ones you can find in activiti-engine/src/main/resources/org/activiti/db/upgrade.
If you can add those also in a diff script then I can try to integrate it into trunk.
Thanks,

Here the svn diff file ( from 5.6 tag ) , with upgrade files added ( but, not tested ).
Bye
Stefano
Tinvention.net

[trademak]

Hi Stefano,

I committed the patch, see JIRA issue http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/ACT-880.

Thanks,

[mlegnani]

Thanks a lot to Stefano for his excellent work. I'm using it in my project and the new feature works fine!
Thanks again,
Massimo.