How does Camunda BPM handle Business Data and Flow Objects?

[Thong Huynh Trung]

Hi all,

I have a question regarding to Business Data and Flow Objects. How do you handle data in Camunda BPM e.g. creating business objects, mapping them to process variables, saving their values into database (see attachment)?

By Business Data, I mean the data objects that provide the context of the activity. For example, in an Insurance Claim Process, you'd have a data object 'Insurance Claim', which has a couple of properties to identify itself such as claimNumber, claimType, customer and claim description. So, do you have business data objects in Camunda? If you do, how do you create and bind them into your process? If not, how do you store data entered by users? What is the best practice for data management in Camunda BPM?

By Flow Objects, I mean the process variables that help move the process along. For instance, at an exclusive gateway (e.g. Claim approved?), we need to determine which direction the process  should continue, say, Approved or Rejected. There'd be a variable called Claim Decision determining this implemented in the gateway. So how do you do this in Camunda BPM? 

Thanks all,

Best wishes

[Bernd Rücker (camunda)]

Hi Thong.

 

Business Data is your responsibility to save. Normally projects leverage the Java ecosystem to do that, e.g. JPA (Java Persistence API) in a Java EE environment. You need some Java knowledge to do so (see why: http://camundabpm.blogspot.de/2013/04/the-camunda-hypothesis.html). An example can be found here (in German – but that should not matter in that case): https://github.com/camunda/camunda-bpm-examples/tree/master/bestellprozess-java-ee6.

 

For what you call flow objects we use a Map within the process engine, hence you can always store, read and change variable values via the API of the process engine during runtime. You cannot model the flow objects in the BPMN process model! So again, this information will go to the Java code. We do this to gain maximum flexibility in data handling and because this turned out to work extremely well in BPM+Java projects. Understandable what I mean?

 

Cheers

Bernd

Evangelist & Consultant

www.camunda.org/community/team.html

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