History configuration seems not to work for activity level

Flowable Engine
1

Following the Flowable open source documentation (History · Flowable Open Source Documentation) it has to be possible to define the Flowable history level to activity level where the behavior is document as following:

** activity: archives all process instances and activity instances. At the end of the process instance, the latest values of the top level process instance variables will be copied to historic variable instances. No details will be archived.*

My expectation is that during the process execution no process variables are stored in the “ACT_HI_VARINST” history table and only when the process instance is terminated all process variables are then store in history.
Unfortunately it seems that this behavior is not happening and the behavior is like the audit history level: the process variables are stored in the history also during the process instance execution.

May I ask if my interpretation of Flowable documentation is wrong ?
If it is correct, it a Flowable bug ?

Thank you.
Luigi

2

Hey @Luigi,

Your expectations are incorrect. Depending on the history level Flowable is going to store the information in the historic tables.

If you choose history level none, or instance then variables are not going to be stored in the historic table at all.

Cheers,
Filip

3

Ciao @filiphr
I have set set history level to activity as follow:

flowable.history-level=activity

and I was expecting a different behavior form the default setting (aka audit) especially for the process variables.
Why this is not happen ?

Tks.
Luigi

4

Hey @Luigi,

Sorry, but I am not following. You linked the information from the docs. The activity level does store the variable information. The difference to the audit here is that it will not store the user information about the updates of the variables and the variable updates audit log.

So, when you use activity variables are going to be stored in the history table.

Cheers,
Filip