The best practise to bind JPA-Entity to process

[omd]

Hi,

I would like to ask you, what is the best way of binding a JPA-Entity to activiti process?
I tried to set bean as a process variable:

variables.put("myBean", myBean);
runtimeService.startProcessInstanceByKey("myProcess", variables);
‍‍‍‍

But this solition has a big drawback. I store the same data in two different places. One is table generated by my entityManager, and second is serialized object variable in activiti DB. The other problem is with querying by fields of my bean, I believe it is so complicated because there is  always need to deserialize a bean before checking values of fields.

Is it possible to store in a process only a reference to my bean ? I could do it by hand by define some map wiring  task id with my bean id.  Maybe there is some mechanism out of box which do this work?

Best Regards.

[omd]

Is it a good idea to store in process variables only jpa-entity object id?
<java>
variables.put("myBeanID", myBean.getId());
runtimeService.startProcessInstanceByKey("myProcess", variables);
</java>

Regards

[jbarrez]

> Is it possible to store in a process only a reference to my bean ?

Activiti has out of the box JPA integration, solving exactly this problem: http://activiti.org/userguide/index.html#_jpa

[jwestra]

Joram,

I'm interested in learning more on Activiti/JPA integration.  Our business entity layer is Cassandra and not JPA-enabled, but understanding the semantics might allow us to replicate similar behavior.

For instance, what classes/methods does Activiti add the hooks to autostore and autoload (e.g. if the process var is annotated as a JPA entity, go load it from the EntityManager when the process variable is loaded)?

Jason

[jbarrez]

Check following classes to get an idea:

https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/blob/master/modules/activiti-engine/src/main/java/org/activiti/...

https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/blob/master/modules/activiti-engine/src/main/java/org/activiti/...

https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/blob/master/modules/activiti-engine/src/main/java/org/activiti/...

https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/blob/master/modules/activiti-engine/src/main/java/org/activiti/...