When i set description in a userTask, it is written to ACT_RU_TASK but not to ACT_HI_TASKINST

Flowable Engine
1

We have workflows with userTasks where we set a certain description in a taskListener to make it easier to find it afterwards. This worked with activiti 5 very well, but it seems that something has changed with flowable 6.
I can see, that the description is saved to ACT_RU_TASK but not to ACT_HI_TASKINST. If a task is completed we cannot longer find this task in history tables by searching for this description.

An example code snippet:

    <userTask id="usertask1" name="usertask1">
      <extensionElements>
        <activiti:taskListener event="create" class="org.flowable.engine.impl.bpmn.listener.ScriptTaskListener">
          <activiti:field name="script">
            <activiti:string><![CDATA[
                  System.out.println(task.getName()+" in onCreate. description: ["+task.getDescription()+ "] id: [" +task.getId()+"]")
                  task.setDescription('idxy')
              ]]></activiti:string>
          </activiti:field>
          <activiti:field name="language">
            <activiti:string><![CDATA[groovy]]></activiti:string>
          </activiti:field>
        </activiti:taskListener>
      </extensionElements>
    </userTask>

A workaround is to save the task explicitly with

taskService.saveTask(task)

right after setting the description.
But for me, it seems to be a bug. I think the description should be written to both tables, the runtime and history tables.

2

Hello @joe-sch,
have you seen?

3

Yes sure i know this article.
It says: Any unfinished Task has an entry in ACT_RU_TASK.
And then

  • ACT_HI_: These tables contain historical data for both running and completed instances. The names of these tables follow the names of their runtime counterpart.

My expectation is, that if a Task has a description in ACT_RU_TASK, the description should also be in the counterpart history table: ACT_HI_TASKINST.

But this is not the case if i set the description as i tried to explain in my first post.
We have moved from activiti 5.15 to flowable 6.6 a few months ago. And i’m sure that the same code to set the description in the tasklistener worked very well with activiti 5.x.
The question is what has changed and was it wrong in activiti or is this error now in flowable 6.6