License

The Flowable project is distributed under Apache license V2.

Documentation

• The Flowable User Guide
• The Flowable CMMN User Guide
• The Flowable DMN User Guide
• The Flowable Form User Guide
• Flowable Javadocs

Links

• Flowable Forum
• Flowable issues

Flowable Release Notes

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.4.1

Highlights

GENERAL

• A new table has been added to keep track of all changes that happen with a user / human task. A HistoricTaskLogEntry is created when the assignee of a task changes, or the owner, or for example the due date. By default the user / human task logging is disabled, with the enableHistoricTaskLogging property in the process or cmmn engine configuration, the user / human task logging can be enabled.
• A new runtime and historic entity link table has been added to store the relationship between parent entities and all children. This means for example that when a parent process instance has a sub process, and the sub process has a user task, that for the user task two entity links are created, one between the parent process instance and the user task, and another with the sub process instance and the user task. The same is true when a case instance starts a process instance via the CMMN Process Task for example. This makes it possible to get all child tasks for a parent process instance for example. By default, storing entity links is not enabled in the Flowable engines, but using the enableEntityLinks property in the process engine configuration and/or CMMN engine configuration this can be enabled.
• Support for DMN 1.2 (https://www.omg.org/spec/DMN, still in beta). This is foremost a XSD and parse support.
• Various small bugfixes and improvements all around.

BPMN

• A runtime activity instance table has been added to allow you to query for the activity instances that have been executed for a running process instance without needing to go to the history tables. This includes active and completed activity instances. When a process instance is completed or terminated, the runtime activity instance will be deleted and only available in the historic activity instance table.
• The sequence flows that are taken are now also stored as part of the runtime and historic activity instance data. This provides a more complete audit history of the process instance execution.
• The process instance migration feature has been extended with logic to allow migrating process instances with call activities and support moving the current active state from a parent process instance to a sub process instance and vice versa.
• The admin app now contains a migrate process instance button in the process instance view, that allows for simple migration cases to define the activity mappings and execute the migration.
• Multi tenancy improvements to support lookups for process, case, form, and decision table definitions within the tenant, but also allow for a fallback lookup in a default tenant of choice. This makes it possible to share common definitions in a default tenant, and only use tenant specific definitions when necessary.
• REST services have been added to make it easier to fetch a form definition associated with a user task or a start event. Also, completing a form for a user task or starting a process instance with a form is now a lot easier via REST. Getting a BPMN user task form can be done via GET process-api/runtime/tasks/{taskId}/form for example, and completing a user task can be done via POST process-api/runtime/tasks/{taskId} as it was possible already before. But now the payload can contain a form definition id and outcome value to complete the user task with a form.
• Using transient variables in the BPMN web service task instead of using process variables for values that should not be persisted in the variables table.

CMMN

• Plan item instances are now stored in the runtime tables until the case instance is finished. This allows to query the state of a case instance without having to use the historical api's or data.
• The engine will automatically detect when event listeners (user, generic or timer) are not useful anymore and remove the event listener instances.
• Addition of a new 'trigger mode' called "on event" for event resolving in sentries that allows to scope the event evaluation to that evaluation cycle only (versus with memory as is the default). This enables advanced models where events (and consequentially the related sentries) only should be evaluated at the moment they happen.
• Addition of the task and plan item lifecycle listener, similar to task and execution listeners in BPMN.
• To support modeling arbitrary user or automated actions in CMMN, it is now possible to use a 'generic event listeners'. This event listener behaves like a user event listener, but can be triggered programmatically through an API (see the CmmnRuntimeService).
• It is now possible to make a user or generic event listeners repeatable, which allows a more natural way of modeling cases where a certain event happens multiple times.
• Greatly improved cross border resolving of sentry dependencies (across multiple and potentially nested stages).
• A first version of case instance change state has been added to the Flowable CMMN Engine. In the CmmnRuntimeService you can now use the createChangePlanItemStateBuilder to define and execute the case instance change state logic. This first version supports changing state focused on human tasks. In the next version more support will be added for more complex cases.
• REST services have been added to make it easier to fetch a form definition associated with a human task or a plan model. Also, completing a form for a human task or starting a case instance with a form is now a lot easier via REST. Getting a CMMN human task form can be done via GET cmmn-api/cmmn-runtime/tasks/{taskId}/form for example, and completing a human task can be done via POST cmmn-api/runtime/tasks/{taskId} as it was possible already before. But now the payload can contain a form definition id and outcome value to complete the user task with a form.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.4.0

Highlights

• A first version of process instance migration has been added to the Flowable BPMN Engine. In the RuntimeService you can now use the createProcessInstanceMigrationBuilder to define and execute the process instance migration. This first version supports migrating process instances with wait states, embedded (event) sub processes and boundary events. In the next version more support will be added for more complex cases like parallel and inclusive gateways, multi-instance activities and call activities.
• Expression support have been added for the BPMN and CMMN engines to make it easier to work with variables and in specific variables that may not have been initialized yet. When you reference a variable in an expression like ${customerNumber > 40} and there is no customerNumber variable yet, an exception would be thrown. With the variable expression support this can be handled without an exception with ${variables:getOrDefault(customerNumber, 0) > 0}. A similar expression is possible for strings with ${variables:get(customerName) == "test"}. The user guide describes the full set of available variable expressions.
• A first version with support for MongoDB persistence has been added. The MongoDB module is available from a separate Git repository at https://github.com/flowable/flowable-mongodb. The MongoDB module is made available in a separate repository, so that it can be released in a different pace than the full Flowable Engine releases. The support of MongoDB already includes most BPMN constructs, but in the coming releases it will be extended to be on par with the relational database support.
• Upgrade to Spring 5.x for all the integration modules using Spring.
• Added plan item lifecycle listener to the CMMN engine, to allow for listening to plan item instance state changes
• In the Task app support for activating manual plan items and triggering user event listeners has been added
• Added support for JUnit 5.
• Support for using java.time.Duration variables and expressions for Timer durations.
• Chinese translation has been added for the UI apps.
• Various small bugfixes and improvements all around.

Upgrade notes

Idm Engine SpringEncoder

The deprecated constructor from SpringEncoder that accepted org.springframework.security.authentication.encoding.PasswordEncoder has been removed

Custom IdGenerator using a Bean in Spring Boot

It is now possible to define the custom IdGenerator for the Flowable Process engine, by creating a bean of type IdGenerator. If no bean is provided the StrongUuidGenerator will be used. If there is a bean qualified with @Process then this one would be used, otherwise a unique global one would be used. If there are more global beans then the default StrongUuidGenerator will be used.

FlowableFunctionDelegate changes

The method functionClass has been removed from the org.flowable.common.engine.api.delegate.FlowableFunctionDelegate interface. This doesn't change anything with regards to adding custom functions to expressions: returning the right Method in functionMethod() is enough.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.3.1

Highlights

• Introduction of an app engine, so apps are now a first class citizen and the process engine is not misused any more to handle app deployments. When starting the Flowable Task application all app deployments are automatically migrated to the new app engine.
• Added async history support to the CMMN engine.
• Added more history information to the CMMN engine with historic plan items.
• Improved the Spring Boot support and upgraded to Spring Boot 2.0.2.
• Enhanced debugger in the Flowable Task application to evaluate expressions and scripts.
• Made the job service more generic with the scope type property to improve the possibility to run different job handlers for different job types.
• Various small bugfixes all around.

Community contributors

• Pascal Schumacher (PascalSchumacher)
• Amina Zoheir (AminaZoheir)
• Toni (ttonl)
• David Malkovsky (dbmalkovsky)
• Michael Lippens (mlippens)

Upgrade notes

Package renaming

To make the Flowable modules compatible with OSGi and Java 9 modules some package renaming was needed to prevent clashes. The renaming has been done according to this pattern org.flowable.engine.common -> org.flowable.common.engine

StrongUuidGenerator usage with Spring Boot

The Spring Boot process auto configuration now uses the StrongUuidGenerator. In case you were overwriting the default one you can remove that. In case you want to keep using the DbIdGenerator, then just add the following bean to your configuration:

    @Bean
    public EngineConfigurationConfigurer<SpringProcessEngineConfiguration> processEngineDbIdGeneratorConfigurer() {
        return engineConfiguration -> engineConfiguration.setIdGenerator(new DbIdGenerator());
    }

IdmEngineConfigurator

The default IdmEngineConfigurator and SpringIdmEngineConfigurator have been moved from org.flowable.app.engine.impl.cfg and org.flowable.spring.configurator to org.flowable.idm.engine.configurator and org.flowable.idm.spring.configurator respectively. In case you have used them please replace your imports.

Async history classes package change

The async history classes have been moved from the process engine module to the job service, to make them available for other components. Generally, the packages now have job.service added to make this clear.

• Classes with regards to async history collection and execution (AbstractAsyncHistoryJobHandler, AsyncHistoryJobHandler, AsyncHistoryListener, AsyncHistorySessionFactory, AsyncHistorySession, DefaultAsyncHistoryJobProducer, HistoryJsonTransformer) in the org.flowable.engine.impl.history.async have been moved to the org.flowable.job.service.impl.history.async package.
• Classes related to executing async jobs using a message queue (most notably AsyncHistoryJobMessageHandler and AsyncHistoryJobMessageReceiver) have been moved from the org.flowable.engine.impl.asyncexecutor.message to the org.flowable.job.service.impl.asyncexecutor.message package.
• Similarly, for executing async history jobs using a message queue: the classes in the package org.flowable.engine.impl.history.async.message are now found in the org.flowable.job.service.impl.history.async.message package.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.3.0

Flowable 6.3.0 has turned out to be a big release with many new features (and even more fixes). Many thanks to all the community contributers that participated in the release and a special shout-out to Pascal Schumacher, Zach Visagie, Robert Hafner, Christophe Deneux and Seif El Deen Khaled

Highlights

Note: Flowable now requires JDK 8 as a minimum version!

GENERAL

The Spring Boot starters have all been updated to version 2.0. There are now starters available for each engine (BPMN, CMMN and DMN). Check the completely revised documentation for more details!

• Support and fixes for running various modules on JDK 9 (the engines themselves already ran on JDK 9)
• Updated all 3rd-party libraries to latest versions
• The REST app can now be configured to use privileges, instead of all users being able to make REST calls.

BPMN

• Performance enhancements with great results. Read all about it here: https://blog.flowable.org/2018/03/05/flowable-6-3-0-performance-benchmark/
• Dynamic task and subprocess injection into running process instances is now fully supported and out of experimental state
• Allow the configuration of history on individual process definitions, overriding the engine default setting
• Introduce the 'triggerable' service task: a service task that provides configurable service calls that are executed externally and call the engine when done. The implementation is guaranteed to be correct with regards to the transactional behavior of the engine.
• Support for a transaction-lifecycle based event listener
• Support for 'sameDeployment' when looking up the called process definition for a call activity
• HTTP task: support for storing response variables transiently
• Multi instance: support for Iterable when resolving a collection (e.g. ArrayNode)

CMMN

• REST API support for all CMMN services and operations
• Support for asynchronous service tasks
• Support for manual activation rules and enabling/manually starting plan items through the runtime service
• Support for required rule
• Support for autocomplete
• Support for completion neutral
• A Script task type has been added
• Support for User event listeners
• Support for viewing and managing CMMN date in the Admin app

DMN

• Support for collection expressions, such as IN and NOT IN
• Improved decision table editor user experience to make it easier to add JUEL expressions in specific rules
• Support for viewing and managing decision executions in the Admin app

APPS

• All apps have been rewritten to use Spring Boot 2.0. All apps now use one property file for configuration. Please check the documentation, as many new configuration options are available (with backwards compatibility for old properties).
• Support for expressions in the options fields, including dropdown, radio and hyperlink fields
• Support for a password fields in the form editor and runtime
• Multi-tenancy support in the Modeler by defining the active tenant in the Modeler property file

Upgrade notes

To remove duplicate code, some more logic has been added to the common modules, such as flowable-engine-common and flowable-common-rest. For example, the scripting engine has been moved to the flowable-engine-common module so it can be used by both the BPMN and the CMMN engine. If you are using Flowable internal classes then it is possible that some package changes to the common modules are required. Most of this should be automatically handled by your IDE.

All Flowable apps (IDM, Modeler, Task, Admin and REST) now read their configuration from the flowable-app.properties file, which is included in each WAR file in the META-INF/flowable-app folder. Consequently, a single, shared flowable-app.properties can be placed on the classpath for all apps. All property files (e.g. db.properties for the REST app) are still read and work in a backwards-compatible way.

The default way user credentials are authenticated and verified when calling the Flowable REST API has changed. A user now needs to have the access-rest-api privilege (before, any valid credentials could be used). An admin user can be given this privilege by setting the flowable.rest.app.admin.user-id and flowable.rest.app.admin.password properties in the flowable-app.properties file. On start-up, the admin user will be created if it doesn't exist, or it will be given the access-rest-api privilege. This admin user can then give other users this privilige using the Flowable IDM app or through a REST call (doing an HTTP post to privileges/{privilegeId}/users with the userId in the body).

By default, all Flowable apps (IDM, Modeler, Task, Admin and REST) are configured to use an in-memory H2 database that is persisted in the user home folder, which is shared between all apps by default. Previously, each app had its own in-memory H2 database.

Due to upgrading to the latest Spring Security dependencies for handling the authentication for all the Flowable apps, users can get a "cookie theft exception" when accessing the apps with a cookie from a previous version that is still present in the browser. The reason for this is that Spring Security has changed the way cookie tokens are hashed. A hard refresh or relogin fixes this by generating a new cookie. If you don't want to force your users to do this, you can delete all rows from the ACT_ID_TOKEN database table. This will invalidate all old cookies and all users will have to login again.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.2.1

Highlights

• Lots of additions to the CMMN 1.1 Engine, including timer support, repetition support, DMN and HTTP task support and variable query support.
• Rest documentation is now also generated based on the Swagger definitions to ensure it's always in sync with the REST controller code
• Improved support of ChangeActivityStateBuilder to move an execution in a process instance to another activity that's part of the process definition
• Enhanced the CMMN Modeler palette with timer event listeners, DMN and HTTP tasks and additional properties like timer expressions and repetition expressions.
• Improved support of CMMN in the Flowable Task app.
• Various small bugfixes all around.

Community contributors

• Pascal Schumacher (PascalSchumacher)
• Stijn de Pestel (stijndepestel)
• Robert Hafner (roberthafner)
• Xin Wang (dram)
• David Malkovsky (dbmalkovsky)
• Michael Lippens (mlippens)
• Marco van Zwetselaar (zwets)
• Yanming Zhou (quaff)
• Christophe Deneux (cdeneux)

Upgrade notes

To harmonize the deployers between the BPMN and CMMN engine the ProcessEngineConfigurator interface has been renamed to EngineConfigurator and moved to the flowable-engine-common module. In addition a new flowable-spring-common module has been added to shared common Spring classes between the BPMN and CMMN spring modules.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.2.0

Highlights

• Introduction of a new CMMN 1.1 Engine. This provides an implementation of the CMMN 1.1 OMG standard. A lot of effort has been put in this new Engine, and it uses a new set of database tables optimized for CMMN execution. We've added a new CMMN user guide to help you getting started. Note that since this is a first release, the CMMN Engine is marked as an experimental feature and missing features like timers and HTTP and Decision tasks will be added in next releases.
• Added a CMMN editor to the Flowable Modeler app.
• Added support for CMMN cases ot the Flowable Task app.
• The BPMN and CMMN engine share a number of common services like Tasks, Variables, Identity links and Jobs. Therefore these services are extracted from the core BPMN engine module and new modules have been created for each one of these services. The BPMN and CMMN engines make use of these services to provide for example Task and Variable support. With this approach Flowable is very flexible in the deployment model. You can run only the BPMN Engine, only the CMMN Engine or run them both together without any issues.
• Various small bugfixes all around.

Community contributors

• David Malkovsky (dbmalkovsky)
• Filip Hrisafov (filiphr)
• Robert Hafner (roberthafner)
• Marco van Zwetselaar (zwets)
• Lori Small (lsmall)
• Michael Lippens (mlippens)

Upgrade notes

Because of the extraction of the Task, Variable, Identity Link and Job services, we had to change the package names of the classes used in these modules. This means that for example TaskQuery and Job Query have been moved to a new package. This was done to adhere to OSGi standards and to be ready for the new Java 9 version. This however does mean that you run into some compilation issues while migration to version 6.2.0. We always try to prevent this as much as we can, but due to the new modules this wasn't possible in this release. The common naming pattern of these new service is org.flowable.{servicename}.api for the API module and org.flowable.{servicename}.service for the service implementation module. So org.flowable.task.api and org.flowable.task.service for example.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.1.2

Bug fix release

Thanks to whee we found out that there's an issue with the release 6.1.1 when running it without an Internet connection https://forum.flowable.org/t/upgrading-6-1-0-to-6-1-1-could-not-read-idm-mybatis-configuration-file/753. This was fixed with the following commit https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine/commit/7338015dc8aadc984ff9dd4ad3385b6a7b4ace6f. Although an Internet connection is often available, we decided to do a bug fix release to prevent people from running into this issue.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.1.1

Highlights

• Introduction of audit history in the DMN Engine. When history is enabled in the DMN Engine, an audit log of each decision execution is stored in the DMN database. By default the history is disabled.
• Replaced the MVEL expression language in the DMN Engine with the same JUEL expression language as used in the BPMN and Form Engine.
• Refactored DmnRuleService with new ExecuteDecisionBuilder and deprecated old execute decision methods.
• Call activity - allow to set output parameters a local variables for multi instance executions.
• Easier usage of async history in combination with a message queue (see https://github.com/flowable/flowable-examples/tree/master/async-history)
• Performance improvement: introduce grouping and compression for async history data
• Various small bugfixes all around.

Community contributors

• Faizal Abdul Manan (faizal-manan)
• David Malkovsky (dbmalkovsky)
• Harsha Teja Kanna (h7kanna)
• Lori Small (lsmall)
• bsydow
• stephraleigh

Upgrade notes

CommandContext and related classes package changes:

As a result of a refactoring that involved consolidating various classes and moving them to the flowable-engine-common module, following internal classes have changed packages.

The following applies to all engines (process, dmn, form, content and idm):

• The CommandContext class is now in the org.flowable.engine.common.impl.interceptor package.
• The various getter methods on the CommandContext that gave quick-access to various internal components are removed (because the CommandContext is now shared between all engines). All engines now have a CommandContextUtil class that should be used instead and which has said getter methods. The org.flowable.engine.impl.context.Context utlity class in the process engine is still there for backwards compatibility and can be used as before, but simply delegates to the CommandContextUtil methods.
• The classes related to the command stack interceptors (Command, CommandContextInterceptor, CommandExecutor, Log/Jta/RetryInterceptor) are now in the org.flowable.engine.common.impl.interceptor package.
• The DbSqlSession and DbSqlSessionFactory classes are now found in the org.flowable.engine.common.impl.db package.
• Database schema management logic has moved from the DbSqlSession class to implementations of the org.flowable.engine.common.impl.db.DbSchemaManager interface.
• The GenericManagerFactory class is now in the org.flowable.engine.common.impl.persistence package.

The process engine now has the org.flowable.engine.impl.util.EngineServiceUtil utility class that can be used to get easily access to the configuration and services of the other engines.

FlowableCancelledEvent.getCause() return value change

The value that's passed in the cause of a org.flowable.engine.delegate.event.FlowableCancelledEvent has changed in the following cases:

• The event that is thrown for activities cancelled by a message boundary event.
• The event that is thrown for activities cancelled by a signal boundary event.
• The event that is thrown for activities cancelled by a timer boundary event.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.1.0

Highlights

• Introduction of async history. By enabling the asyncHistoryEnabled property on the process engine configuration (default is false), the history tables are not filled in the same transaction as the runtime tables. Instead an async history job is created and the history information will be written to the history tables in a separate, asynchronous transaction. This also opens up the option to not use the relational history tables at all, and move the historic information to a NoSQL database directly. Pluggability points are available to implement the persistence logic to a NoSQL database.
• New REST task feature thanks to Harsha. With the new REST task it becomes trivial to do REST calls from a Flowable process instance. There's also support in the Flowable Modeler for REST tasks.
• Introduction of a new DMN decision table editor. To improve the usability of the DMN decision table editor we are now using the Handsontable framework.
• The Engine SQL update logic has been improved to only update changed columns.
• The Odysseus JUEL code is now included directly in the flowable-engine-common module to prevent classloading issues due to conflicting JUEL libraries or even different versions of JUEL libraries.
• Added option to use a password encoder for the Flowable IDM engine (instead of the default plain text password persistence), thanks to Faizal!
• Support for static Groovy scripts compilation with the new flowable-groovy-script-static-engine module by using the groovy-static scriptFormat value, thanks to Filip (fgroch)!
• Several additions to the Form builder and renderer (min/max length, improved expression field and more).
• Various small bugfixes all around.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.0.1

Highlights

• First bug fix release for Flowable 6!
• Improved LDAP support for the UI apps
• The i18n in the UI apps is now pluggable and there are some first additional languages included
• Improved event sub process support with nested event sub process support for non interrupting ones
• More hit policy support in the DMN Engine. The Decision Table editor will be updated in the Flowable 6.1.0 release. The DMN Engine API has been refactored to take into account single and multiple output result objects.
• Various small bugfixes all around.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.0.0

Highlights

• First official release of Flowable 6!
• Documentation has been updated to Flowable 6 and a DMN and Form Engine user guide have been added.
• Various small bugfixes all around.

Release Notes - Flowable - 6.0.0.RC1

Highlights

• Package renaming to org.flowable, and renaming of config files to flowable.cfg.xml and flowable-context.xml. It was not an easy decision to go this route, but for the clear distinction and separation of the Flowable project this is the best way forward. The discussion for this choice can be found in this forum post http://forum.flowable.org/t/opinions-on-package-renaming-for-flowable-6-to-org-flowable/118/13
• Class name renaming to use Flowable instead of Activiti where needed.
• The identity functionality is separated in the IDM engine, and the identity database tables are managed by this engine. By default the IDM engine is enabled when starting the Flowable engine, but it can be disabled with the disableIdmEngine property.
• Introduction of a content engine, which provides a simple file store for attaching files/documents to a task or process instance.
• Support for non interrupting event sub processes. Until this version only interrupting event sub processes were supported, but now it's possible to handle events and let the main process execution continue as well.
• The task app has been refactored into 3 separate web applications. There's a Flowable Modeler app that contains the modeling repository functionality + the BPMN, form and DMN editor. The second app is the Flowable IDM app that manages the users and groups and handles authentication for each app. For example the Flowable Modeler will redirect to the Flowable IDM app when no valid cookie is found. After logging in to the Flowable IDM app, a redirect to the Flowable Modeler is executed and you can access the Modeler repository. This is done to allow for single sign-on between the different apps. The third app is the Flowable task app, that allows you to start process instances and work with tasks and fill-in forms.
• Introduction of the Flowable Admin application that allows for querying the BPM, DMN, Form and Content engines.
• Introduction of Docker images to make it easy to start all apps in a convenient way. In the docker folder several docker start scripts can be found that use a Docker compose file. In an upcoming blog post we will share more information on how this can be used.
• Persistency logic that was written in Hibernate has all been rewritten to MyBatis to have a common framework for all persistency logic.
• Various and many small bugfixes all around.

Release remarks

• This a major milestone to get to the final Flowable 6.0.0 release. All parts of the release are now considered feature complete, so the remaining work will be bug fixing and smaller features.
• We will continue to improve the docs for the 6.0.0 release.
• At this point all community testing is extremely important for the quality of the 6.0.0 release. So every contribution is this area is very welcome.