I was wondering if the Activiti engine has a hook to enable a listener to be configured whose callback method is invoked whenever a process instance progresses from one activity to the next.
Our current 'in house' workflow has hooks that allow us to configure a listener that fires off certain actions based on entering/exiting particular activities. We're looking to switch over to Activiti and need to be able to implement this functionality somehow.
I noticed that there seems to be some extensions in Activiti's BPMN file but we were hoping to plug this in at the Java level to avoid modifying all of the process definitions.
Yes this is supported via ExecutionListeners –> http://www.activiti.org/userguide/index.html#executionListeners If you don't want to add the execution listener in every process definition, you can write a BpmnParseListener to add it to all process definitions. Extend the AbstractBpmnParseListener class and hook it in to the process engine configuration like this:
<property name="customPostBPMNParseListeners"> <list> <bean class="org.activiti.cdi.impl.event.CdiEventSupportBpmnParseListener" /> </list> </property> Note that in Activiti 5.12 the BpmnParseListener changes quite a bit. But the idea and logic remains the same.
We don't use spring so I'm hoping that the 'bean' in
<bean class="org.activiti.cdi.impl.event.CdiEventSupportBpmnParseListener" /> does not imply Spring support must be present.
Does the BpmnParseListener activate when a process definition is added to the repository or each time a process instance is created for the process definition?
No need to use spring, you can add the listener to the processEngineConfigurationImpl in code as well…
The listener is called when:
New process is deployed
Process is added to the deployment-cache (again) after engine reboot or when definition was evicted from cache.
So you can be 100% sure that EVERY process-definition that is going to be used, will pass through the listener. In that listener, you can add execution-listeners (class implementing ExecutionListener interface) to ALL flow-elements in the parsed process. This way, every process that runs, you'll be notified of every step completing…
So you can be 100% sure that EVERY process-definition that is going to be used, will pass through the listener. In that listener, you can add execution-listeners (class implementing ExecutionListener interface) to ALL flow-elements in the parsed process. This way, every process that runs, you'll be notified of every step completing…
It's called 'BpmnParseHandler' now. Implement that interface, and attach to each SequenceFlow your own ExecutionListener which is called on state transation, shouldn't be too hard.
