History and multi instance SubProcess

[iam]

Hi, guys.
I'm playing with retrieving historical sequence way for process instance and was confused a little bit by the case with multi instance sub process (not a call activity).
I have SubProcess with loop cardinality 3 and there are some activities in the sub process.
When I get historical activity instances like that:

    List<HistoricActivityInstance> historicActivityInstances = historyService.createHistoricActivityInstanceQuery()
        .processInstanceId(processInstanceId).orderByHistoricActivityInstanceStartTime().asc().list();
‍‍‍‍

I can not determine which subprocess loop instance contains which activities.

Real example: I have three phones and multi instance sub process for this three phones. Each instance will make call and analyze call result code to send SMS when no answer. After that I want to know (and see) each way for each sub process instance.
Is it possible?
Yes, I know I can use call activity, but my actualy goal is retrieve correct sequence way for any type of designed processes.

And one strange thing more: executionId of the first sub process instance looks strange - i.e. "9" when other instances have "20" and "22". I expected something like 18, I've analized tables and dont understand why ACT_HI_ACTINST has executionId "9" as scope just for the first instance.
I tried to retrieve historical variables:

historyService.createHistoricVariableInstanceQuery().executionId("9").list()
‍‍‍

Historic variables for executionId=9 realy looks like scope variables with "nrOfInstances" and other two (20 and 22) have "loopCounter".
The question is: where is my loopCounter for the first instance?

[jbarrez]

Not sure if I'm following, but: multi instance won't show up in the history logs, only multiple historic activities. Which I agree, is not really nice and we should make that better.

[iam]

Thanks, Joram.
I've done simplest test with multi instance script task and the history log looks… a little bit unexpected:

ACT_HI_ACTINST
[table][tr][h]ID_[/h][h]PROC_DEF_ID_[/h][h]PROC_INST_ID_[/h][h]EXECUTION_ID_[/h][h]ACT_ID_[/h][/tr]
[tr][td]6[/td][td]testProcessA:1:4[/td][td]5[/td][td]5[/td][td]startevent1[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]10[/td][td]testProcessA:1:4[/td][td]5[/td][td]9[/td][td]scripttask1[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]26[/td][td]testProcessA:1:4[/td][td]5[/td][td]18[/td][td]scripttask1[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]31[/td][td]testProcessA:1:4[/td][td]5[/td][td]19[/td][td]scripttask1[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]34[/td][td]testProcessA:1:4[/td][td]5[/td][td]5[/td][td]endevent3[/td][/tr]
[/table]

ACT_HI_VARINST
[table][tr][h]ID_[/h][h]PROC_INST_ID_[/h][h]EXECUTION_ID_[/h][h]NAME_[/h][/tr]
[tr][td]7[/td][td]5[/td][td]5[/td][td]orderId[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]11[/td][td]5[/td][td]9[/td][td]nrOfInstances[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]13[/td][td]5[/td][td]9[/td][td]nrOfCompletedInstances[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]15[/td][td]5[/td][td]9[/td][td]nrOfActiveInstances[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]20[/td][td]5[/td][td]17[/td][td]loopCounter[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]24[/td][td]5[/td][td]18[/td][td]loopCounter[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]29[/td][td]5[/td][td]19[/td][td]loopCounter[/td][/tr]
[/table]

Execution "9" is a scope. If we would not have this executionId in ACT_HI_ACTINST then we will not know how to retrieve "nrOfCompletedInstances" by executionId.
On the other hand.. if we dont have execution "17" in ACT_HI_ACTINST then we dont know nothing about execution with loopCounter=0

/

And about executions:

In runtime I've got each of the three execution using breakpoint in some test method of my test bean.
I always use Context.getExecutionContext().getExecution() in my beans to use current execution, I actualy do not use execution as argument in processes.
It was surprise: the first execution was a ScopeExecution, the second and the third was ConcurrentExecutions.
I just try to modify MultiInstanceActivityBehavior from
[java]
    if (loopCounter == 0) {
        callCustomActivityStartListeners(execution);
        innerActivityBehavior.execute(execution);
    } else {
      execution.executeActivity(activity);
    }
[/java]
to
[java]
    if (loopCounter == 0) {
      callCustomActivityStartListeners(execution);
      try {
        Context.setExecutionContext((ExecutionEntity)execution);
        innerActivityBehavior.execute(execution);
      } finally {
        Context.removeExecutionContext();
      }
    } else {
      execution.executeActivity(activity);
    }
[/java]
I'm not shure if that was correct to set Execution Context there, but after that Context.getExecutionContext().getExecution() returns ConcurrentExecutions for each parallel instances.

[jbarrez]

One thing to note ios that the execution id in the ACT_HI_ACTINST is not really usable to correlate with the ACT_HI_VARINST, as it's not necessarily the execution that enters the activity that will be used to set variables.

I'm not following you remark about setting the ExecutionContext. To my knowledge, that class serves a few use cases (getting the context in case of job failure is one I believe). If you'd want to rely on that call, it would need to be added on many more behaviours besides the MultiInstance behaviour.