Hi, Flowable Experts,
Me and my team are looking into implementing some processes using Flowable BPM Engine and are wondering if there is a statement regarding the skipExpression feature in Flowable.
It is interesting, since it allows to skip a step in the process without modelling a conditional gateway.
However to us it looks something carried out from Activity and not mentioned in the documentation at all. Is this a feature we can use freely or we should stay away from it and model the behavior with a conditional gateway.
flowable-engine/MethodExpressionServiceTaskTest.java at 97fe915e1d247c11983a4fc130efd2fb9ca1c447 · flowable/flowable-engine · GitHub
Best Regards, Chavdar
I can’t speak to the skip expression functionality specifically, but IMO I would say from a design perspective that if skipping a process step has business meaning than it’s better to use a conditional gateway to express this functionality. The reason for this it gives more visibility to the decision steps a workflow process instance took, such when viewing a instance with the admin tool, then if the logic is buried within a skip expression or other mechanisms. The rule of thumb is for the workflow express to model the underlying business process including key decision steps.
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Hey @chavdarbaykov,
What @jwashington is saying are best practices for how to use Flowable.
The skip expression feature is a special feature that is mostly tailored towards migrating old processes to Flowable or for executing some integration tests where you want to skip certain tasks.
Cheers,
Filip