History details

[swiderski.maciej]

Hi,

I am about to start work on history details and before I start want to collect your ideas and expectations on what shall be included. Here is a list of items that I identified (or was already defined in code/jira) and I find them required:

• task assignment changes
• start work on task
• change priority of task
• start of the process mainly user information (who did it)
• signal wait state again, mainly user information (who did it)
• variables updates, since history can be already enabled but it will keep the most recent value

All of them will rely on provided user information, it will be secured when working with BPM console but if working though API it must be provided manually.

Please share your thoughts so we could have the most complete solution with 4.5.

Cheers,

Maciej

[rebody]

Hi Maciej,

Glad to hear that you will work on this issue.  This will be a big important feature in jBPM-4.5.

Here is some requirements that I met.

1.need retrieve sub process instance and super process instance relationship from history

2.need know the starter of a process instance

3.retrive task name from history task. refer: https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JBPM-2896

4.need query all of history tasks of a process instance.

Cheers.

[mwohlf]

I have some requirement regarding the HistoryTaskImpl, basically this is what https://jira.jboss.org/browse/JBPM-2896 is all about, just want to sum it up here:

• the duedate property in HistoryTaskImpl is handled in the constructor and copied over from TaskImpl, just having this mapped to a database field would be nice. Something along the line of adding <property name="duedate" column="DUEDATE_" type="timestamp" /> in jbm.history.hbm.xml  (and a setter and getter for this)
• I would like to have the name of the task stored in the HistoryTaskImpl tabel too, it seems easy to implement, copy over in the contructor from TaskImpl and map to a database field.
• I would like to be able to query all HistoryTasks for a certain ProcessInstance, I am not sure how this can be implemented in a smart way. There is a property "executionId" which might be helpfull for this but it seems this is not fully implemented yet, so I am open for any good ideas here

thanks for looking into this

[mwohlf]

in HistoryProcessInstanceImpl i would like to have a setter for the key:

public void setKey(String key) {
      this.key = key;
}

i am assigning a business key after the process already started and is stored in the history table

so having this method would simplify things for me. Since there is a setter for the state property

too I don't think this is a big deal...

cheers

Michael

[swiderski.maciej]

Michael Wohlfart wrote:

• I would like to be able to query all HistoryTasks for a certain ProcessInstance, I am not sure how this can be implemented in a smart way. There is a property "executionId" which might be helpfull for this but it seems this is not fully implemented yet, so I am open for any good ideas here

I implemented that by joining HistoryTask with HistoryActivityInstance to narrow down for a particular process instance id. Since entire history is not yet finished I don't have complete solution, but if someone is interested I could extract this as a patch for a review.

[rebody]

Hi Maciej,

Many of our customers want to know how to get the previous/next activity of a process.  Part of this feature should be done by history service.  Could we support this feature in the next version?

Regards.

[swiderski.maciej]

Hi HuiSheng,

if it comes to previous activity you can find them using already available HistoryActivityInstanceQuery. The only disadvantage is that you will get both already finished and active activities. What we could do here is to introduce new parameter to narrow down the search to finished activities only, so result will have all activities that the process has already completed.

What do you think about it?

[rebody]

Hi Maciej,

I think it is enough for now.  And it would be better to provide related documents.

[swiderski.maciej]

Hi guys,

please take a look at follwoing jira issue and last comment JBPM-2398 and let me know what do you think

Cheers

Maciej

[mwohlf]

looks good to me,

do you need all those lazy="false" in jbpm.history.hbm.xml?

My tests run fine without them but I am using a different hibernate version :-/

[swiderski.maciej]

In fact I set it to be able to get access to some information that are related to the detail, for example variable name when getting all variable updates. When I removed them and rerun the tests, following failed:

Test set: org.jbpm.test.query.HistoryDetailQueryTest
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tests run: 9, Failures: 0, Errors: 1, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.328 sec <<< FAILURE!
testHistoryVariable(org.jbpm.test.query.HistoryDetailQueryTest)  Time elapsed: 0.047 sec  <<< ERROR!
org.hibernate.LazyInitializationException: could not initialize proxy - no Session
    at org.hibernate.proxy.AbstractLazyInitializer.initialize(AbstractLazyInitializer.java:86)
    at org.hibernate.proxy.AbstractLazyInitializer.getImplementation(AbstractLazyInitializer.java:140)
    at org.hibernate.proxy.pojo.javassist.JavassistLazyInitializer.invoke(JavassistLazyInitializer.java:190)
    at org.jbpm.pvm.internal.history.model.HistoryVariableImpl_$$_javassist_39.getVariableName(HistoryVariableImpl_$$_javassist_39.java)
    at org.jbpm.pvm.internal.history.model.HistoryVariableUpdateImpl.toString(HistoryVariableUpdateImpl.java:49)
    at org.jbpm.test.query.HistoryDetailQueryTest.testHistoryVariable(HistoryDetailQueryTest.java:186)

After additional review it seems like it is required mainly for variable stuff since it uses persistent fields (to get variable name). Most likely is not required for others, the API is not too verbose in that matter.

[mwohlf]

I don't have line 186 in my HistoryDetailQueryTest :-/

[swiderski.maciej]

Yeap. my mistake forgot to include these tests in the patch. Here comes the link to updated patch:

https://jira.jboss.org/secure/attachment/12336598/history-detail-20100827.patch

I modified it a bit to leave only lazy='false' for variables.

Huge thanks for reviewing.

[mwohlf]

great work, thanks a lot, can't wait to use the history stuff

just to summarize the schema changes somewhere, we now have the following new fields in the database:

JBPM4_EXECUTION.INITIATOR_

JBPM4_HIST_PROCINST.INITIATOR_

JBPM4_HIST_PROCINST.SUPERPROCID_

JBPM4_HIST_TASK.NAME_

JBPM4_HIST_TASK.DUEDATE_

[swiderski.maciej]

Thanks, similar summary is in jira as well.

If no one will have objections I will commit it beginning of next week.