[jboss-dev-forums] [Design of JBoss ESB] - Re: StartProcessInstanceCommand: Return token id/process ins

[Kevin.Conner@jboss.com]

"apestel" wrote : SignalCommand, CancelProcessInstanceCommand, and setProcessInstanceVariables

Signal and setProcess should have been removed in the rewrite but weren't.  Signal is severely broken and you should not be modifying *any* process variables other than through the interactions with jBPM.  It is up to jBPM to drive that process.

"apestel" wrote : If someone uses the ESB to kick off a process instance and they also want to use the ESB to be able to cancel that same process.
Agreed, and that is the only useful use case so far.

"apestel" wrote : In addition to this is the even more common case I run into where the customer (NAVTEQ most recently) want to use BPM for service orchestration.  So, client invokes a service on the ESB and that ESB service needs to synchronously kick off the orchestration of other services, aggregate a result, and return it to the original client.
Having things done 'synchronously' in an ESB does not imply synchronous invocations.

"apestel" wrote : I've been telling folks to just not even use BpmProcessor and to implement their own custom action instead that invokes/controls the BPM process.  I see many more real life use cases for a synchronous BpmProcessor than an asynchronous BpmProcessor.
Synchronous BpmProcessors mean nothing in this environment.  If you create a business process then you are ceding control to that process but that does not mean that you cannot receive notifications/replies from it.

"apestel" wrote : If this action were updated to support synchronous use, it would be nice to generically support "bpmToEsbVars" in addition to "esbToBpmVars" to be consistent with the way things are done when jBPM invokes an ESB service.
Synchronous invocation of the jBPM APIs is not necessary for integration with jBPM and is inadvisable for a number of reasons, including its effect on transactions and thread usage.

If you can send me an example where you think this is necessary then I will look at it and see how it can be reworked.  If we are missing something then we can add it.


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