Timer Duration seems not to be working

[victorbos]

Hi all,

First of all let me say that I'm new to activiti and therefore might do something silly 🙂
The thing is that I'm creating a unit test against a bpmn diagram that starts with a Timer start event in which i set the duration to 1 hour (PT1H). So I expect the process to wait for an hour before it continues. But instead of that I see that it progresses immediately. There must be something wrong in my setup I guess…..
Hope you can help!

Victor

This is the simple flow that I created to test the timer start event. It has a script with a counter and a gateway that will loop back to the start event five times. In the output I see that it hits the script without the hour delay that I expect:
<code>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<definitions xmlns="http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/20100524/MODEL" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:activiti="http://activiti.org/bpmn" xmlns:bpmndi="http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/20100524/DI" xmlnsmgdc="http://www.omg.org/spec/DD/20100524/DC" xmlnsmgdi="http://www.omg.org/spec/DD/20100524/DI" typeLanguage="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" expressionLanguage="http://www.w3.org/1999/XPath" targetNamespace="http://www.activiti.org/test">
   <process id="TestTimer" name="TestTimer" isExecutable="true">
      <startEvent id="timerstartevent1" name="Timer start">
         <timerEventDefinition>
            <timeDuration>PT1H</timeDuration>
         </timerEventDefinition>
      </startEvent>
      <endEvent id="endevent1" name="End"></endEvent>
      <scriptTask id="scripttask1" name="Script Task" scriptFormat="groovy">
         <script>def count = execution.getVariable("count") ?: 0
            count ++
            execution.setVariable("count", count)
            println("&gt;&gt;&gt;" + new Date() + " count=" + count)
         </script>
      </scriptTask>
      <sequenceFlow id="flow1" sourceRef="timerstartevent1" targetRef="scripttask1"></sequenceFlow>
      <sequenceFlow id="flow2" sourceRef="scripttask1" targetRef="exclusivegateway1"></sequenceFlow>
      <exclusiveGateway id="exclusivegateway1" name="Exclusive Gateway"></exclusiveGateway>
      <sequenceFlow id="flow3" sourceRef="exclusivegateway1" targetRef="timerstartevent1">
         <conditionExpression xsi:type="tFormalExpression"><![CDATA[${count<5}]]></conditionExpression>
      </sequenceFlow>
      <sequenceFlow id="flow4" sourceRef="exclusivegateway1" targetRef="endevent1">
         <conditionExpression xsi:type="tFormalExpression"><![CDATA[${count>=5}]]></conditionExpression>
      </sequenceFlow>
   </process>
</definitions>
<code>

And the corresponding unit test:
<code>
public class TestTimer {
   ProcessEngine processEngine;
   ActivitiRule activitiRule;

   @Before
   public void setup(){
      processEngine = ProcessEngineConfiguration.createStandaloneInMemProcessEngineConfiguration().buildProcessEngine();
      activitiRule = new ActivitiRule(processEngine);
   }

   @Test
   public void testTimer(){
      Deployment deployment = processEngine.getRepositoryService().createDeployment().addClasspathResource("diagrams/TestTimer.bpmn").deploy();
      activitiRule.getRuntimeService().startProcessInstanceByKey("TestTimer");
   }
}
<code>

[jbarrez]

You have created a timer start event. It means it will start on certain times … not the way you describe.
When you call startProcessInstanceByKey, the engine will just start it, ignoring the timer definition.