How to pass an object field from a process to a sub-process

[houstoniasian]

In the main process, I have a list of employee {firstName, lastName}

to call multi sub-processes, the XML is as follow:


  <callActivity id="callActiviti" name="Call Sub Process" activiti:exclusive="false" calledElement="subProcess">
      <extensionElements>
        <activiti:in source="employee.firstName" target="firstName"></activiti:in>
        <activiti:in source="employee.lastName" target="lastName"></activiti:in>
      </extensionElements>
      <multiInstanceLoopCharacteristics isSequential="false" activiti:collection="employeeList" activiti:elementVariable="employee">  </multiInstanceLoopCharacteristics>
    </callActivity>


I know the source "employee.firstName" has to be something else.  What should I put there?

Thank you,

Tan

[frederikherema1]

You should use sourceExpression instead, e.g.:

<activiti:in sourceExpression="${employee.firstName}" target="firstName"></activiti:in>


[houstoniasian]

It does not work. 

First of all, how does activiti even know the definition of "employee" object?  I defined Employee with private firstName & private lastName.  Then I have the public employee.getFirstName() & employee.getLastName().  I also have a bean "employee" defined in "activiti-standalone-context.xml":   <bean id="employee" class="domain.Employee" />

I feel like either Activiti does not support passing object feature or I miss something.

Tan

[frederikherema1]

Not really sure what you're trying to do here. Most of the time, you use "employee" (or any arbitrary name) in expressions if you want to reference process-variables. All process-variables are exposed in the expressions. So if you have a POJO (serializable) instance of type com.mycompany.Employee set as "employee" variable, it's available in expressions.

If you then use "${employee.firstName}", JUEL (EL implementation) gets the employee-pojo and checks if there are getters for the "firstName" property. In case "employee" was instance of a Map, it whould try to get the value for key "firstName".

You can also reference beans from within your expressions. So if you have a bean configured in the configuration, it should be accessible to all of your expressions. Make sure it's configured correctly. If you're usine the SpringProcessEngineConfiguration, by default ALL spring-beans are exposed. If you're using the "normal" configuration, you should manually register what beans you want to see exposed (see userguide, beans-section)…