Boundary timer not working

[Cristian Requena]

Hi all,

I'm not being able to get a boundary timer working as I expect it should, and I'd like to get some help here ;)

I have defined a basic BPMN (see the attached png), which, if i'm not wrong, should be halted at "A" and "B" user tasks while no further action has been done.

Once the timer duration (PT30S) has been elapsed, the "A" task should be cancelled and the process should be waiting at the latter ParallelGateway until "B" and "C" tasks are completed.

The thing is my boundary timer doesn't cancel the "A" task (yes, it has the Cancel Activity tick checked).

Does my process have any mistake? Do I need to configure something to get boundary events working?

Thank you!

Cristian.

[Cristian Requena]

I'd like to add something: my act_ru_job table shows that my timer job has been retried 3 times.

I tried to fine-logging it, but I've seen no timer references at all :\

ID_, REV_, TYPE_, LOCK_EXP_TIME_, LOCK_OWNER_, EXCLUSIVE_, EXECUTION_ID_, PROCESS_INSTANCE_ID_, RETRIES_, EXCEPTION_STACK_ID_, EXCEPTION_MSG_, DUEDATE_, REPEAT_, HANDLER_TYPE_, HANDLER_CFG_, DEPLOYMENT_ID_

'5612', '1', 'timer', NULL, NULL, '1', '5611', '5604', '3', NULL, NULL, '2013-10-14 13:22:24', NULL, 'timer-transition', 'BoundaryEvent_4', '5601'

[Nico Rehwaldt]

Hi Cristian, 

the boundary event does not require any kind of special configuration.

The boundary event should indeed cancel the user task.

Could you attach an annonymized BPMN 2.0 xml of the process you tested?

I would like to try to reproduce your findings locally. 

Best regards, 

Nico

[Cristian Requena]

Hi Nico,

Here you are my bpmn xml file.

This is my timer boundary definition:

    <boundaryEvent id="BoundaryEvent_4" name="" attachedToRef="tskB">
      <outgoing>SequenceFlow_15</outgoing>
      <timerEventDefinition id="TimerEventDefinition_3">
        <timeDuration xsi:type="tFormalExpression">PT30S</timeDuration>
      </timerEventDefinition>
    </boundaryEvent>

Thank you!

Cristian.

[thorben....@student.hpi.uni-potsdam.de]

Hi Cristian,

the RETRIES_ column does not mean that the job has been retried three times. In fact, it is the other way round: the job may still be retried three times. It could be that the job executor is not running in your setup so the job is never picked up. What is your setup? Are you running the process in a unit test or are you running it in the platform? In both cases, the process engine and job acquisition configuration would be helpful.

Cheers,
Thorben

[Cristian Requena]

Hi Thorben,

As you figured out, I had no JobExecutor running.

I've tuned accordingly my Spring ProcessEngineConfiguration to start it.

 <bean id="processEngineConfiguration"
 class="org.camunda.bpm.engine.spring.SpringProcessEngineConfiguration">
   <property name="dataSourceJndiName" value="java:jboss/datasources/ProjectXADS" />
   <property name="transactionManager" ref="transactionManager" />
   <property name="transactionsExternallyManaged" value="true" />
   <property name="history" value="full" />
   <property name="deploymentResources" value="classpath*:/diagrams/*.bpmn20.xml" />
   <property name="jobExecutorActivate" value="true" />
 </bean>

Thank you!

Cristian.