'user' task without using UserTask

[tgreanier]

We have a production system using activiti to manage our processes. Up to now we have only included service tasks, deferring work on user tasks until now.

I have a good understanding of how user tasks work and how to implement them. However, I have run into a problem and I am looking for any advice or comments on my conclusions.

We do not deploy our activiti engine to tomcat, opting instead to deploy it embedded in our standalone application. This works very well for us. Now when I try to add a UserTask I have issues when trying to link it to activiti explorer. It seems that even though the activiti explorer and our application share the same database I need to actually deploy my application into activiti explorer for UserTask to work correctly.

This is not a good model for us so I have come up with the following:

1. Created standard ServiceTask types that write information to a queue
2. An external UI will monitor this queue and pull the information, displaying it to an end user.
3. The user submits from the UI, putting a response message on another queue
4. A ReceiveTask picks up from this response queue.

So essentially I am mimicking the idea of a UserTask and avoiding the need to tomcat to be my deployment engine.

[trademak]

Hi Todd,

There should be no need to deploy your application into the Activiti Explorer to get user tasks to work. Why did you come to that conclusion?

Best regards,

[tgreanier]

Hi Tijs,

Thanks for the response. I am glad to hear you ask that question because it confused me as well. However, when I try to "link" the user task via Activiti Explorer it did not work with only the DB being shared. I got errors - first that it could not find the camel-core/activit-camel jars (no problem with that one) and second with classes not being found. The classes not being found were "my" classes and unless I put those classes in the Activiti Explorer classpath it continues to fail.

I thought the way it would work is I could deploy my standalone application with a user task and the shared DB would provide the information needed to make this work, but I cannot get that working.

[jbarrez]

It should work though, there is nothing magic about that

> unless I put those classes in the Activiti Explorer classpath it continues to fail.

Which is the way Java works, no? We dont serialize classes to the database …

[tgreanier]

Of course, I understand that. What is confusing me is the user task in question is literally just sending a String in a form and having the user validate it manually and "sign off" by clicking a button. I was under the impression that the receipt of the data (as a form) and the submission back to the BPMN itself would not require access to classes not used in the user task. But when I try to do this it fails with the error about classes not being found - classes I do not even use in the user task.

[trademak]

Hi Todd,

Can you the exact stacktrace you are seeing? Because the Activiti Engine dependency should have all the classes you need.

Best regards,