Maximal length of task descriptions

Flowable Engine
1

Hello!

We are using version 5.22.0 and sometimes there are problems regarding task descriptions (tables ACT_HI_TASKINST, ACT_RU_TASK) that are too long to be persisted into the database after the containing expressions have been evaluated, e.g. > 2000 characters in Oracle UTF-8 (java.sql.SQLIntegrityConstraintViolationException: ORA-01401: inserted value too large for column).

I know there was a similar issue previously regarding process variables. The used solution there was to store everything < 2000 characters as text in the table and everything bigger as a byte array in a different field.

Is there currently a solution or workaround to support longer task descriptions (especially for Oracle databases)?

2

If your database supports it (by default it indeed defaults to 2000 for Oracle), you can change the max length limit by setting the ‘maxLengthStringVariableType’ property on the engine configuration (see https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine/blob/flowable-5.23.0/modules/flowable-engine/src/main/java/org/activiti/engine/impl/cfg/ProcessEngineConfigurationImpl.java#L605).

3

Hi,
The default implementation task description length is limited.
DESCRIPTION_ varchar(4000),
You have several possibilities to extend it. e.g:

  1. Use variable to describe a task instead
  2. Use description as a pointer to the real description value.
  3. Implement your own mechanism to persist tasks (and description too)
    …

Regards
Martin