Debugging engine in a Spring Boot application

Just running the engine in a Spring Boot environment and I feel like I’m overlooking something critical here…
Is the engine meant to be a bit of a black box?
I’ve got an object that contains numerous child objects and fields and I am using flowable to “examine” these fields after serializing the object and passing it into the flowable execution engine.
We’re using the engine to “examine” fields in the objects immediately and based on what’s in there, create some type of response (call a Java Delegate through a service task)
However, if the java delegate does not get called. It’s quit difficult to know what field was missing or why did it not get called (if the expected data exists in the object when I’m passing it into the engine)
Is there a sort of debug mode I’ve failed to activate?

Allow process debugger:
(there is also cmmn version currently in the state of pull request)

I’ve got a custom engine configuration similar to this one: https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine/blob/1dfc2ff502d2b462c47d0844e0ce4a2ca79a1e36/modules/flowable-rest/src/test/java/org/flowable/rest/conf/engine/EngineConfiguration.java

How would I be able to go about shimming in the debugger configuration that’s linked in the blog post here: https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine/blob/flowable-6.3.0/modules/flowable-ui-task/flowable-ui-task-conf/src/main/java/org/flowable/app/conf/FlowableDebuggerConfiguration.java#L55

And potentially dumping this information into a log file?

One possibility could be to configure process engine configuration with the debugger.
Add whole configuration from debuggerProcessEngineConfigurationConfigurer to

@Bean(name = "processEngineConfiguration")
    public ProcessEngineConfigurationImpl processEngineConfiguration() {

Absolutely not. It’s open source, so you can attach the Flowable sources and inspect the code.

Another thing is enabling DEBUG logging, it spits out a lot of information about the execution of the process execution. It should show you exactly where your process ended up in.

I have the following in my log config to grab messages coming out of that package and the output provided in there is pretty invisible once the process variables are sent into the engine, until the process has ended… Is there another item I should be using here?

<Logger name="org.flowable" level="debug" additivity="false">
  <AppenderRef ref="in_use_appender" />
</Logger>

This sounds very promising, I’ll let you know how it works out.

What do you see right now? You should see all kind of logging related to agenda operations and behaviors logging what they are executing.

I’m definitely seeing a lot of that type of thing, however I’m looking more for the values of the fields I’m passing in as they move through the process:
Let’s say this was a series of if statements… Im passing in object

if (object.field != null) {
 if (object.field.value.equals("x") {
  return "is equal x";
if (object.field.value.equals ("y");
  return "is equal y" 
}

No matter how deep this goes, I could log each portion of the conditional checks and determine what’s being checked.
I’d like to do the same thing as logic is executed in conditional expressions on each sequenceflow…

No, that’s currently not logged indeed. What is logged is the effect of the condition (e.g. which activity is taken when following the sequenceflow), but the actual evaluation isn’t.