Reopen ended process instance

[marc.b...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

I have doubts about how to model a process where functionally is permitted to reopen the process once it has been terminated.

Is there no possibility to reopen a process instance in Camunda when it has reached an end event, right?

I thought that I can modelize a parallel gateway to open a way to the end event and another to a user task, which would represent the screen from which you can reopen the process. But, in this case, we will always mantain active processes in Camunda, could it penalize the engine considerably performance?

Which best practices you could recomend me for this kind of circunstancies?

Thanks in advance

[thorben....@camunda.com]

Hi Marc,

If you model the process the way you described, you will have entries remaining in the ACT_RU_EXECUTION table for those process instances. Depending on your use case, this may be a performance issue or not.
However, I do not think this is a good way to go anyway. If I understand you correctly, not every instance is reopened (otherwise you could model it in a way that the process does not end at all, right?). In this case, you will have orphan process instances that will remain in the runtime tables although they are practically dead and you have to take care yourself to remove them at some point in time.

Not knowing your requirements, my suggestion is to model the process of "reopening" in another process model and create a new process instance in the case of reopening. You could easily link this new process instance to the old one by using the business key or looking up the process instance id from the history tables. That way, you can also recover variables if that is required.

Best regards,
Thorben

[marc.b...@gmail.com]

Great, thanks Thorben.

Linking both process instances by using the business key seems to be much better solution.

Thanks a lot