Custom Users and Groups in Flowable

Flowable Engine
1

So my flowable experience is fair to middling, but now I have the need the start looking into assignments and users/groups. I’ve read about it in the documentation, but the docs just point me at using a spring config file, which doesn’t help me at all. I’m not using spring.

I have my Flowable engine setup on a separate database schema as my users and groups. This is because I’m plugging Flowable into an existing system, so the idea here is that I shouldn’t need to copy users and groups into Flowable just so I can take advantage of assignee and candidate groups in the BPMN. But none of what I read helps me to understand what the best tactic would be for accomplishing this.

Nor is there anything out there that really points me at how best to manage the users and groups within the workflow definitions file. Or am I barking up the wrong tree? Should I just set the user(s)/candidate groups in BPMN definitions file as a string, then look them up using the task query api?

2

That’s the easiest solution indeed. The Flowable engine doesn’t really ‘care’ about user/groups, it moves state further and the user/group info is metadata (in a very simplified way).

Alternatively, if you want all the identity api’s to work out of the box (but again, if you have an external system it’s probably not worth the work), you need to plug in your own implementation of the low-level identity classes. The ldap integration gives you some idea how that’s done, especially the LdapIdentityServiceImpl class).