me and my group have been using Activiti 5.18 in combination with a third-party UI application that makes REST calls to Activiti. It would be easier for us if workflow engine and UI were part of a single library / framework. For this reason I am comparing the latest versions of Activiti, Flowable and Camunda, trying to see what they offer in terms of UI capabilities.
I found that in Camunda’s Cockpit I get notified of exceptions as shown in the screenshot below. The origin of the exception is indicated graphically, I can see the stack trace and I can very easily click to the subprocess where the exception was thrown.
I did not see this functionality in Flowable’s web apps. Can you confirm if Flowable has something like this or not? I want to make sure that I am not missing features that are actually there. (I vaguely remember something about Activiti Explorer showing red rectangles around active tasks, but I am not sure.)
Flowable currently doesn’t provide a graphical option to find the exception, however the Flowable Admin app does allow you to find failing jobs and you can view the current state of the process instance of this failing job.
As Tijs says, it’s possible to get to see the same information, just not shown in the same way graphically. All possible to do, just it’s not come up as a priority for others, in contrast to some of the cooler features we’re adding into the core process engine now we’ve got the V6 architecture in place
What are you looking for from the engine and UI being the same library? We’re hearing more that people are less interested in the UI framework because it’s so “easy” to build your own app these days with the JS frameworks out there.
As Tijs says, it’s possible to get to see the same information, just not shown in the same way graphically.
It doesn’t have to be graphical like in Camunda. I just need a convenient way of seeing which processes failed and which subprocess raised the exception.
I will run another test with Flowable’s UI to check if I can see failures as indicated by Tijs.
What are you looking for from the engine and UI being the same library?
We would need:
Starting / cancelling processes
List of running processes
History of processes
Indication of failure, subprocess causing the failure and stacktrace
We’re hearing more that people are less interested in the UI framework because it’s so “easy” to build your own app these days with the JS frameworks out there.
I am sure I could cobble together something that would give me the above features. The issue is that this would take too much time (I am not a front-end developer) and time is scarce because of other priorities. If I can get something out of the box, I will use that. Personally I would expect this to be part of the workflow software (like in Airflow for example), but I understand if others disagree.
