Engineering Excellence

All Camunda blog posts tagged with Engineering Excellence.

Aug 10, 2015

Bringing Together: Transactions, Cancel Events and Compensation Tasks

If you’ve ever been lucky enough to enjoy Camunda’s BPMN training then you probably have fond memories of the slide featuring Compensation tasks and Cancel events. It happens to be the very last slide in the symbol set section and is traditionally follows by a well deserved break. It also happens to be a very well implemented part of the Camunda engine. This post is going to be all about how a process containing a transaction, cancel end event and compensation task are all implemented. The process I’m going to be describing is available on GitHub to download and play with yourself. the process itself looks like this: This process describes booking a holiday, as this is an example…

By Niall Deehan

Engineering Excellence

Aug 10, 2015

Migrate Process Versions

My colleague Ingo just finished a new cockpit plugin allowing to easily migrate a running process instance to a new version of the process definition: You can find the sources of the plugin on GitHub: https://github.com/camunda/camunda-cockpit-plugins/tree/master/cockpit-plugin-version-migration If you want to build some migration scrips (as customers often do) you can easily cherry-pick some code from the plugin to apply it yourself, see ProcessInstanceMigrationResource.java for the core functionality). By doing so you can e.g. migrate a bunch of instances in one go – and adjust some variables on the way (as new versions might require new data). Please note that version migration has limitations and risks – we collected them in the README. We used an unsupported internal Command. The whole…

By Bernd Ruecker

Engineering Excellence

Aug 5, 2015

Start and complete a process with the REST API

Please note that this post is getting older and parts are out of date. If you’re looking to use our REST API, you can find updated versions here: Camunda Platform 8: Start a Camunda Platform 8 Process via REST with Webhooks Camunda Platform 7: Start and Step Through a Process with REST (feat. SwaggerUI) If you’ve already downloaded the Camunda BPM platform you’ve already got our invoice example running locally. So I’m going to start with how you might run through that process using our REST API. I’m going to assume that you’ve got some method of making those calls either programmatically or using a RestClient (I’ve used chrome’s advanced rest client to test the calls). So lets begin… Starting…

By Niall Deehan

Engineering Excellence

Aug 3, 2015

Job Prioritization for Asynchronous Processing at Scale

Camunda users process heavy workloads with the process engine. Often this includes asynchronous processing which is handled using the job executor component. The amount of jobs that need to be processed can quickly reach an order of magnitude of millions of jobs per day. To bring order into situations of high job executor load, Camunda BPM 7.4.0 will ship job prioritization. With our first 7.4.0-alpha1 release, you can already have a look at it and give it a try. This article deals with three questions: What is Job Prioritization useful for? How to use Job Prioritization? What will this look like in 7.4.0? The Case for Job Prioritization Up to date, Camunda BPM is used by a growing number of…

By Thorben Lindhauer

Engineering Excellence

Jul 31, 2015

Camunda BPM 7.4.0 Alpha 1 Released

Today we release Camunda BPM 7.4.0-Alpha1. This is the first alpha release previewing the upcoming 7.4.0 Release. The highlights of this release are: DMN (Decision Model and Notation): DMN Engine and browser based Decision Table Editor, Job Priorities: Control execution order of asynchronous Jobs, Enhanced BPMN Support: add Signal Start events, Compensation Event Subprocess, enhanced asynchronous continuations for Multi Instance Activities, Native support for File Variables in Api and Html Forms, Many Bugfixes Overall more than 140 issues were closed. See complete Release Notes in Jira. Download For Free Run with Docker DMN: Decision Model and Notation This is the first release which supports DMN (Decision Model and Notation). DMN is a new OMG (Object Management Group) standard for Business…

By Daniel Meyer

Engineering Excellence

Jul 28, 2015

Setting up a Development Environment for Camunda HTML Forms

Are you developing HTML forms for Camunda Tasklist? Are you re-packaging your application with maven and re-deploying it to Tomcat or WildFly for each HMTL form change? Are you annoyed by this? 🙂 There is hope: this post explains how to setup a development environment which allows you to develop forms inside Camunda Tasklist and refresh your changes without re-packaging and re-deploying your application. We use this kind of setup ourselves when working on the Invoice Example which is provided with the Camunda Distribution. In the following I am assuming that you have setup an application according to the blueprint provided by our Getting Started Guide. Step 1: Adding a Maven Profile for development First you need to add a…

By Daniel Meyer

Engineering Excellence

Jul 7, 2015

How to clean up/purge the camunda history tables

We get this question very often from customers: How can we get rid of old history data that we don’t need anymore? First it’s important to ask: “What do you mean by ‘old data’?”. This is completely business focused and depends on the use of cockpit, who is working with the history data, how reports are generated and maybe even constraints due to legislation. One of our customers – Hamburger Sparkasse (Haspa) – built a solution that is flexible enough to address the issues raised by the questions above: They created a bunch of SQL scripts Created a parameter for the number of days that completed process instances should remain in the database which then moved the old data into a set of archive…

By Ingo Richtsmeier

Engineering Excellence

Jun 26, 2015

Deploy a Camunda BPM Docker Image with Amazon Web Services

No one could argue that deploying the Camunda BPM platform to a web server is unmatched in its adrenaline-inducing excitement, but we should spare a thought for those people whose aversion to scripts and consoles has meant that they have never had the opportunity to enjoy Camunda BPM deployments to their fullest. Until now… In this post I’m going to explain in detail how you can deploy Camunda BPM to a server using docker and Amazon Web Services (AWS) and interestingly enough – it doesn’t require so much as a glance at a console cursor. To achieve this we’re going to be using two Amazon services: RDS – to setup the process engine’s database EC2 Container Service – as…

By Niall Deehan

Engineering Excellence

Jun 15, 2015

Would you use Apache Cassandra for Camunda persistence?

I am currently planning a hack session with people who are interested in using Apache Cassandra as database for Camunda Process engine. Their main motivation for supporting us is that their whole application is running on Apache Cassandra and they want to use Cassandra as persistence provider for their workflows as well. They have extensive experience with Cassandra and want to contribute their work as open source. If the hacksession which will take place at the beginning of July is successful, we would setup a public repository on GitHub were the community could collaborate around this. I have blogged about our friends at Zalando doing work in that direction as well. Would more people be interested in being able to…

By Daniel Meyer

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