Does c8 support process instance migration?

Camunda 8 Topics Discussion & Questions
1

Will Teoh: I have a quick question on different version of the workflow published. Is there a way to upgrade the running instances to the latest version as well? Or how does Camunda deal with this? Thanks in advanced! Hope someone able to enlighten me~

korthout: In Camunda Platform 8 this is not supported yet, but it’s an often requested feature that we plan to build rather sooner than later.

Currently the workaround is to cancel the process instance entirely and create a new process instance, at the start event.

With the upcoming Camunda Platform 8.1 release, you’ll be able to <camunda-platform-docs/process-instance-creation.md at 8fc3e2d7fac7a2ea7568316b16e5009bbba5ae28 · camunda/camunda-platform-docs · GitHub and start a process instance at a user-defined element>, which allows you to recreate the process instance as it was before. There are some limitations to this (you cannot start inside a multi-instance element, you cannot start inside a call activity), but this workaround will cover most cases.

If you really need this feature in your workflow engine I’d recommend for now to use Camunda Platform 7 which fully supports <Camunda Platform 7 documentation | docs.camunda.org feature>.

After the 8.1 release, it is likely that we will start work on the version migration feature.

Note: This post was generated by Slack Archivist from a conversation in the Camunda Platform 8 Slack, a source of valuable discussions on Camunda 8 (get an invite). Someone in the Slack thought this was worth sharing!

If this post answered a question for you, hit the Like button - we use that to assess which posts to put into docs.

2

Will Teoh: <@UUUKGMW1M>

3

Will Teoh: > With the upcoming Camunda Platform 8.1 release, you’ll be able to <camunda-platform-docs/process-instance-creation.md at 8fc3e2d7fac7a2ea7568316b16e5009bbba5ae28 · camunda/camunda-platform-docs · GitHub and start a process instance at a user-defined element>, which allows you to recreate the process instance as it was before. There are some limitations to this (you cannot start inside a multi-instance element, you cannot start inside a call activity), but this workaround will cover most cases.
Do you mean that the upcoming C8.1 that have the capability to create & start process instance is still not exactly the same as C7 process instance migration?

4

korthout: That’s what I meant yes. The Process Instance Migration feature allows to create a migration plan of one (or even many) process instance(s) of a specific process version to a different version of that same process.

Starting a process instance at specific elements is a separate (and much simpler) feature.

C7 also supports <Camunda Platform 7 documentation | docs.camunda.org instance modification> which we are currently building in C8 (planned for 8.1 as well). This feature allows you to alter the state of an existing process instance, but only within that specific version of the process.