Hibernate 3.2.x

[bdruth]

Will JBoss jBPM be able to take advantage of Hibernate 3.2.x when it is released to GA? If not, when does JBoss anticipate supporting Hibernate 3.2.x in jBPM?

Cheers,
Brice

[kukeltje]

I'm not experienced in this area, but do you have specific areas where you think Hibernate 3.2.x can be an advantage to jBPM over 3.1?

[bdruth]

Yes. Hibernate 3.2 provides support for a feature that's been missing for the past year & a half that relates to outer joins on optional parameters. To date, we've had to drop to SQL queries to support this, but HBN 3.2 removes this limitation and provides full support from the Criteria & HQL query objects.

Personally, I'm not yet the expert in this area - my colleague is. So, that said, I may have slightly misstated the issue. I apologize in advance!

For jBPM, we'll need this capability to support our retrieve tasks use case, which will support filters / sorts above and beyond what jBPM provides out-of-the-box.

[kukeltje]

"bdruth" wrote:
I apologize in advance!

Don't ;-)

"bdruth" wrote:
For jBPM, we'll need this capability to support our retrieve tasks use case, which will support filters / sorts above and beyond what jBPM provides out-of-the-box.

Why not help support it out of the box? in the jbpm 3.1 admin there is some functionality for this, but this still has to be ported to jbpm 3.2 (mainly becaus of ui changes). Could you describe the functionality you are going to add?

Ronald

[bdruth]

We're not really working on UI level things at the moment. We're going to support back-end queries like "return page 2 of all tasks, with a page size of 15, that have a status of new, active, or active-suspense and whose creation date is within the last two weeks for actors user12, user13, or user14"

Something along those lines.

[bdruth]

Note - I just got out of a meeting with my colleague, he will be sending me the URL to the JIRA issue for HBN that talks about this feature. He also indicated that apparently this is in 3.2.1

[kukeltje]

hmm. not doing ui stuff. The thing you describe is very important for a performant pageable tasklist. The current implementation I have internally does not do this well. So it would be a great enhancement.

[bdruth]

Indeed, that's why we're doing it :). But, we're not working on the UI at the moment. There's a pre-existing UI that we will be integrating with in August - it already has a workflow backend (custom), that we'll be replacing with the new jBPM backed backend.

The UI uses displaytag 1.1 which supports paging. Our main problem is that our retrieve tasks use case requires that we be able to filter on optional fields.

I may just grab 3.2.1 when I can and see if it breaks anything.

[bdruth]

"kukeltje" wrote:
I'm not experienced in this area, but do you have specific areas where you think Hibernate 3.2.x can be an advantage to jBPM over 3.1?

OK, here's what my colleague provided:

The enhancement we were talking about is:

http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-16

Currently scheduled for 3.2.1. The scenario where we may need to do something like this is to do a retrieval of tasks (by arbitrary hibernate criteria) sorted by an optional variable key. The sorting must be done using a left outer join on the variable tables (because it is optional), or tasks that are missing that variable won't be in the list. While potentially this could also be done with some ugly subselects, the left outer join syntax is much cleaner. Perhaps JBPM knows of an even better way to do it?