We are in the process of upgrading to jBPM 5.2 (from 5.1). As I could not find any explicit notice about the upgrade process in 5.2 documentation, I assumed version 5.2 is backwards compatible with version 5.1.
Apperantly, there are some incompatibilities. We got java.io.EOFException error while unmarshalling the existing jBPM 5.1 process timers (see the stack dump below).
Caused by: java.io.EOFException
at java.io.DataInputStream.readShort(DataInputStream.java:315)
at java.io.ObjectInputStream$BlockDataInputStream.readShort(ObjectInputStream.java:2769)
at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readShort(ObjectInputStream.java:946)
at org.jbpm.marshalling.impl.ProcessMarshallerImpl.readProcessTimers(ProcessMarshallerImpl.java:204)
at org.drools.marshalling.impl.InputMarshaller.readSession(InputMarshaller.java:310)
at org.drools.marshalling.impl.InputMarshaller.readSession(InputMarshaller.java:196)
at org.drools.marshalling.impl.DefaultMarshaller.unmarshall(DefaultMarshaller.java:93)
at org.drools.persistence.SessionMarshallingHelper.loadSnapshot(SessionMarshallingHelper.java:91)
... 67 more
When I compare 5.1 and 5.2 versions of org.jbpm.marshalling.impl.ProcessMarshallerImpl class, among other changes I see that implementation of readProcessTimers and writeProcessTimers are different. Is there any script or utility available to upgrade existing 5.1 timers (and/or any other process instance data) to 5.2 format?
P.S. IMHO, persisting session or process instance data in binary format has to be re-evaluated as it creates lots of difficulties while investigating operational issues. If it was done for flexibility then a human readable format (e.g. json or xml) would be a better choice.