In my process definitions, I have customized some asynchronous tasks from a business process with extensionElements like this one: <serviceTask id="test" name="Test" flowable:async="true" flowable:expression="${someBean}"> <extensionElements><flowable:failedJobRetryTimeCycle>R60/PT1M</flowable:failedJobRetryTimeCycle></extensionElements> </serviceTask>
Every time I save my business process modifications with both Eclipse designer and flowable designer, these extensions are dropped, and I have to manually add them in the XML which is really painful…
Are there any workarounds ?
Is there a problem in my process definition, like namespace bad setup causing this ?
I can’t speak to the Eclipse designer, at this point it is community maintained, but the modeler converts any imported BPMN into it’s own internal representation. When you edit the model in the AngularJS front end, it uses a JSON representation of the model (again this would strip anything it does not understand). In the end it creates a fresh BPMN XML from its internal representation and exports that.
There are thee options that I see:
Keep doing what you’re doing and modify the file afterward
Extend the modeler to understand your XML, with the open source modeler that either means forking or submitting pull requests.
If your are in the position to purchase support and tools, the pallet in the commercial Design product can be extended using a Spring Boot starter. This would allow you to maintain your custom code without either forking or contributing it to the community.
Regarding your 2 last points, actually, I have not added any custom code or features. I am using the official failed job retry policy configuration which is described in Flowable documentation here: https://flowable.org/docs/userguide/index.html#failRetry
So, I tend to consider this as a bug now, and I plan to create an issue to both modeler and designer.
open a bug report on the github project page and wait for a developer to have time or submit a PR. it is unlikely that there will be a fix to anything but web based modeler without a pull request.
Since Flowable 6.5.0 & #2009 PR, the modeler allows to edit failedJobRetryTimeCycle value for an asynchronous service task.
It preserves now such existing elements at editing.