Some Questions about Activiti

[jaco1]

Hi there all. I hope I am posting this in the correct place. I have some question.

We have been using Oracle Workflow Standalone for 13 years now. We created our own front end UI using Oracle Forms. This all works very well but time has moved on and Oracle dropped the support for Workflow Standalone and we are not able to run the Forms screens on mobile devices so we have to redevelop our UI as well.

We have decided to use Oracle ADF to create the screens as we have a lot of data validations to do and ADF gives us a lot of options. We have decided to use Mule as our ESB as it does everything we want it to do.

Now we have to decide on what BPMN engine to use. We could use Oracle BPM suit as it will give us everything we are used to and need but it comes at a huge cost and we have a opensource drive so that is why I am here. So here are my questions.

1) Is there a graphical monitoring tool for running and completed processes to see where they are currently and where they have been. Can you interact with this tool to retry failed processes or modify the instance variables and change the direction that a process has taken or is taking? Our admin teams who look after the running processes can not sit and write code to trace a failed process or trace its route. They need a super fast way and our current workflow engine gives us this

2) We do not want to use the task list of Activiti. We will create our own in a database as our organizational structure is complex and we calculate who the process has to go to at run time. Therefore there will be a system activity that will calculate who it has to go to. My question here is if I have a human task. Do I have to assign it to somebody? I want the process to wait (block) at a human task and then we will use the API to sent from Oracle ADF to tell the process to continue once the user has done his task in the ADF form. Is this possible ? If I do have to assign an actor can it all be the same one as our application knows who it has to go to at that step.

3) Can an external system like Oracle ADF use the API remotely to interact with a process.

4) Will Activity run inside Weblogic with Oracle ADF?

Kind Regards.

Jaco.

PS I see there is a spam bot on the forum. This makes me worry if this community is active and in use.

[jaco1]

Hi there. Somebody will have to kill the spam bots as the forum is useless at this stage.

[frederikherema1]

1. Currenlty, there is no admin-tool for monitoring the engine. Although, all API-calls are available (both JAVA and REST) to get all the data out and act on that data, accordingly.

2. UserTask don't need to have an assignee. ALso, you can use an assignee on a task that is not really a user in the identity-tables. you can, for example, assign a task to "oracle-adf" even if it's not a user. later on, you can easilly query for all tasks assigned to that user and completed them using Java API or the REST-api. If the input you get from ADF is not really done by a "user", it's better modelling-practice (however, not mandatory) to use a receive-task or an event to indicate in your BPMN-model that the process is waiting on an external (non-user) action.

3. Yes, using REST-api or a piece of java-logic running in ADF that uses the Java API (see userguide and javadocs on what you can do with our API's)

4. Yes

[jaco1]

Thank you so much for your answers. Is there plans to develop a monitoring tool ?  The engine is not complete without the ability to monitor what is going on. I know you have the API but we would rather spend our time developing processes than tools to monitor what is going on.

[martin_grofcik]

Hi.

Another way could be to find products build on the top of Activiti which support monitoring.

Regards
Martin

[jaco1]

Hi Martin. Can you point me to such products. I had a look at edora one but can not seem to find a download to test it.

Kind Regards.