Fully automated processes with long running tasks in Camunda

Camunda 7 Topics Discussion & Questions
3

Hi @enix79,

Here are technical solutions to the two problems you solved via BPMN:

  1. Long-running automated activities: Do not perform the actual activity in the context of the process engine but outside of it. See external tasks for a convenient way to do this. This reduces the process engine’s responsibility to orchestrating the single steps, instead of also actively performing them. If you really need the engine to do the time-consuming things, then you could increase the job executor’s lock timeout and the transaction timeout.
  2. Single process instance per process definition: As a hard guarantee, this can only be solved at database level. So for example, you could add a unique constraint on ACT_RU_EXECUTION.BUSINESS_KEY_ and set the business key of the process instance to the process definition id. You can find other discussions around this topic in the forum, for example How to Start ProcessInstance idempotently? and Idempotent Start Process Patterns.

Cheers,
Thorben