Migrate camunda platform extensions from Camunda 7

Camunda 8 Topics Discussion & Questions
1

Hello,

currently we use Camunda Platform 7 and over time we implemented a couple extensions/plugins for which I am now unsure how we could possibly migrate to Camunda Platform 8. I do not think we will migrate soon, but that obviously correlates with the complexity of migration.
I do not have much experience with Camunda Platform 8 yet except for playing a bit around with modeler and tasklist. I appreciate any ideas and feedback on my questions!

  1. Camunda Platform 8 does not support java objects anymore which is totally fine because we already implemented our own typing, serialization and deserialization framework around. In the end, basically everything we store is strings or byte arrays (depending if it is more than 4000 bytes long). For Camunda Platform 7 we then implemented a custom expression manager so that we are able to work with typed variables within JUEL expressions. How would that be handled with the FEEL engine? Are JSONs automatically deserialized as object within the scripting language? What happens if the JSON is stored as byte arrays? Is that supported as well?
  2. What’s the counterpart for IncididentHandlers in Camunda Platform 8? We used one to notify specific users via mail when an incident occured.
  3. What’s the counterpart for HistoryEventHandlers in Camunda Platform 8? We used these to have our own data base table which was optimized for our filtering purposes.

Looking forward to have insights on how to implement / migrate afored mentioned aspects in Camunda Platform 8!

Kind regards
Adagatiya

2

Hi @Adagatiya

So in Camunda 8 all variables are stored as JSON objects. FEEL makes things much easier to deal with these objects than JUEL did. I’ll have a blog post being published this week with more details about exactly how that works. So i’ll post it here when it’s done.

At the moment i don’t think there’s a counterpart to the incidentHandlers from C7 yet. But its something that I’d like to see added.

Luckily enough there’s a pretty good HistoryEventHandeler equivalent, they’re called Exporters in Camunda 8

3

Hi @Niall ,

thank you for the quick response!

I look forward to that blog post!
From my first impression FEEL gives us a lot more options to work with variables and JUEL did. Probably we can even drop our custom script functions.

Hopefully this will be added at some point but it is not that crucial to us I think.

Good hint! I was searching for the wrong keywords it seems.

Kind regards
Adagatiya

1 Like
4

Oh @Niall ,
I just searched for more information on exporters and stumbled across a blog entry about an exporter which handles incidents: Incident Alert Exporter - Camunda.

Kind regards
Adagatiya

2 Likes
5

Great!
Thanks for posting it :slight_smile:

6