processVariableValueLike ineffective - Why ?

[ugo1]

I can get normally all my tasks included one which contains this variable:

{clientOrderId=1450, …}

when I do:

taskService.createTaskQuery().includeProcessVariables().list()

But when I do :

taskService.createTaskQuery().processVariableValueLike("clientOrderId", "1450").singleResult()

I get a null.

Is it explainable, or am I doing something wrong ?

[ugo1]

I finally found the problem.

It seems that because I stored my clientOrderId variable as a Long, then the Activiti engine is unable to do the comparison with a String (which is normal). But then my question is, why the method processVariableValueEquals takes a String for the value parameter, instead of an Object ?

[jbarrez]

It does:

<code>
/**
   * Only select process instances which have a global variable with the given value. The type
   * of variable is determined based on the value, using types configured in
   * {@link ProcessEngineConfiguration#getVariableTypes()}.
   * Byte-arrays and {@link Serializable} objects (which are not primitive type wrappers)
   * are not supported.
   * @param name name of the variable, cannot be null.
   */
  ProcessInstanceQuery variableValueEquals(String name, Object value);
</code>

The method you used, has a 'like' in it. You can only do a like with a string, not with a number.

[cosminradu_vasi]

Is this operation - processVariableValueLike- case sensitive? I can't find this information in the documentation. We just upgrade in a project to 5.14 because this method wasn't in 5.11, but after a smoke test it seems is case sensitive? Are we missing something or it's just a limitation from activiti 5.14?

Regards,

[jbarrez]

It is case sensitive if your database has case sensitive string comparison. Which most databases have.

[cosminradu_vasi]

Ok,,,I was hopping you guys would have some toLowerCase stuff, because the equals restriction isn't case sensitive and I believe this is what you've done here.

So the collation "bin" from the "act_ru_variables" table is the problem. If we change the collation to something like "utf8_general_ci" will we broke something really bad? Is there a particular reason for "utf8_bin" collation?

[frederikherema1]

Since strings that differ in case aren't exaclty the same, we opted for the case-sensitive approach. Offcoruse, depending on your DB configuration, LIKEs kan work case-insensitive as well. We're using the utf8_bin for that reason (to make our LIKE-unit-tests run on all DB's being case-sensitive). It's perfectly fine, however, to change that. Activiti does not "count" on this behaviour, so it's safe to alter the collation.