JBPM 4 - A New Tale… With To Much Obstacles (right now)

Well, its been a while i´ve cryed out so much terrible words as by now.

JBPM 4 is cool in many details, especially the Service-API (i guess its stolen from Alfresco, its biggest implementor i guess).

Yesterday - on Sunday - i´ve tried to implement my custom task-logic from JBPM 3… i saw the new TaskService API for this case to take use of it. Couldnt be easier, isnt so?

taskService.setVariables("taskId", taskVariablesAsMap);

“Considered it done” - ive said to me yesterday but the expected results turns into a little journey into forum-posts, commentations as well as heavily reading of the current userguides/developer guides. Because of what manner?

Well, the task-variables wont be task-variables as these variables will be propagated to the processinstance. So this means in brief: all task can have access to these variables. So theres no scoping yet available to let it say that some variables should be only - AND THIS MEANS JUST ONLY - locally managed task-variables, so multiple variables with the same name can not be overwritten by itself. By now this will be happen if you got more than one task in your process-definition. That really sucks guys - sorry!

Excerpted from the userguide i read following about this (http://docs.jboss.com/jbpm/v4.0/userguide/html_single/#taskservice):

Tasks can read and update process variables. Later tasks will have the option to declare task-local process variables.

Well done… i´ve to implement scoping for my own as long as JBoss does not scoring this big disadvantage today.

Well dont understand me in the wrong-case! I love what they do, its pretty fine but i hope it will be fixed as soon as possible due to the current release-plan so move on guys, heeejaaaaa!

September 7, 2009 | Filed Under JBPM