Adding dynamic behaviour to the Flowable Engine

We have added a new feature to the Flowable Engine that I would like to share with you even before it's available as part of an official release. The new feature is the ability to change a defined number of properties of a process definition without needing to redeploy the process definition.

Before I'll go into details about this feature, some examples of needing to redeploy a process definition would be good to set the context. One example is a service task with a defined class name in the process definition. This service task is part of a big process definition, and process instances can be active for over a year. After deploying the first version of the process definition to the production environment the requirements of the process execution have changed and a new Java class should be executed for the service task instead. This means that new deployment of the process definition is needed and existing process instances need to be migrated to this new process definition.

Another example is a user task with a candidate group management. Over time, the requirements have changed and the sales group needs to be set as the candidate group for this user task. Again, this would mean a new deployment of the process definition and migration of existing process instances.

With the addition of the DynamicBpmnService interface these use cases can be solved differently, without the need to redeploy the process definition. For example, the DynamicBpmnService interface has a method to change the class name of a specific service task named changeServiceTaskClassName. Let's look at a code example to change the class name of the exampleTask service task.

<serviceTask id="exampleTask" 
  flowable:class="org.flowable.PreviousTask" />

ObjectNode infoNode = dynamicBpmnService.changeServiceTaskClassName(
      "exampleTask", "org.flowable.NewTask");
dynamicBpmnService.saveProcessDefinitionInfo("procDefId", infoNode);

After the invocation of the saveProcessDefinitionInfo method the Flowable Engine will now execute the NewTask class instead of the PreviousTask defined in the BPMN XML. As you can see we are using Jackson JSON for storing the overriding process definition information in the Flowable database. Every process definition can have zero or one entry in the new ACT_PROCDEF_INFO table. All changes for a process definition are defined in the same JSON object and stored as a BLOB in the Flowable database. The cache that's used to retrieve the process definition info data is versioned and designed to work in a clustered Flowable environment.

Let's look at one more example, changing the candidateGroup of a user task:

<userTask id="exampleTask" flowable:candidateGroup="management" />

ObjectNode infoNode = dynamicBpmnService.changeUserTaskCandidateGroup(
      "exampleTask", "sales", true);
dynamicBpmnService.saveProcessDefinitionInfo("procDefId", infoNode);

Again, after saving the JSON object, the Flowable Engine will use the sales candidate group for the exampleTask user task instead of the management group.

If you want to override multiple properties of a specific process definition in different steps you need to get the currently stored JSON object first. This is easy to do like this:

ObjectNode infoNode = dynamicBpmnService.getProcessDefinitionInfo("procDefId");

These are the properties we currently support to change with this approach:

1. Service task - class name
2. Service task - expression
3. Service task - delegate expression
4. User task - name
5. User task - description
6. User task - due date
7. User task - priority
8. User task - category
9. User task - form key
10. User task - assignee
11. User task - owner
12. User task - candidate users
13. User task - candidate groups

And there's an additional feature we have implemented with the same approach, which is localisation. It's now possible to store the user task name and description in multiple languages in the process definition info table and when you query for tasks you can set a locale to use. The returned tasks will then contain the localised name and description as defined in the process definition info table. Let's look at an example:

<userTask id="exampleTask" name="Name" />

ObjectNode infoNode = dynamicBpmnService.changeLocalizationName(
      "es", "exampleTask", "Nombre");
dynamicBpmnService.saveProcessDefinitionInfo("procDefId", infoNode);

Task task = taskService.createTaskQuery().locale("es").singleResult();

The returned task instance will now have Nombre as the name of the task.

We are really excited about this new feature that's available in both the Flowable 5 and 6 code that's in Github, and we are eager to get feedback about this new feature. Let us know what you think about it and maybe come up with suggestions of which properties we could add to this approach in addition to the current supported list. We'll do a 5.18.1 release in a couple weeks time, together with a new beta release for Flowable 6, that will include this feature. And you can already create your own build using the code on Github of course.