Using a multiple instance sub-process in jbpm 6.1

[Nicholas McRae]

I've attached a picture here of our properties for a multiple instance sub-process in jbpm 6.1 in the workbench.

We would like to do the following:

- pass an input variable into the sub-process to use in the sub-process tasks, along with the usual multiple instance functionality

Problem is:

- I don't see a field here where I can call a sub-process

- I don't see a field for variable input outside of the collection access

- I can't find documentation to explain how / if this can be done with the fields in our version

Any help?

[Maciej Swiderski]

Nicholas,

I’d recommend to jump up to jbpm 6.2 if possible as it has number of improvements (mainly in UI and usability part of multi instance). It’s described quite extensive in this article:

http://mswiderski.blogspot.com/2015/01/multiinstance-characteristic-example.html

for 6.1 there are quite some limitations on configuration options out of web designer.

Hope this helps

Maciej

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[Nicholas McRae]

Thanks for the tip.

At this time we would prefer to not upgrade to 6.2 due to time constraints. Can you confirm that what we want to do is not possible in 6.1, so we know we *need* to upgrade to 6.2?

[Maciej Swiderski]

from execution point of view it is possible you would just need to use another editor to configure multi instance - either eclipse editor or define the multi instance by hand in xml.

Maciej

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jbpm-usage/8619aa90-9d7a-466a-af54-35d88497f560%40googlegroups.com.

[Nicholas McRae]

Maciej, please hear me out here.

I wonder if this problem might be a bit easier than we've alluded to in this thread. I've been toying around with eclipse and the workbench trying to get a working solution but am having issues pulling changes I make in eclipse into the workbench. I'm also having difficulty inferring the functionality from the jbpm plugin in eclipse.

So, with that said, I wonder if it might be possible to accomplish what we want in the work-bench.

If I understand correctly the 'multi instance sub-process' that we define is actually defined at the parent process scope. The reason we needed input variables was to map a project id to the task description / comment field in our multi-instance tasks. So I wonder if we might be able to just use variables from the parent process scope in those tasks?

That's something that's easy enough to test, but the *more important* question is how to use the 'collection expression' property of the multi-instance unit. I can't find any documentation on this at all, and am really not sure how it works. If you could point me to an explanation or explain yourself, I might just be out of your hair as I believe this is our last requirement : - ).

[Nicholas McRae]

I just wanted to add a quick note for anyone running into similar difficulties getting this working. We did manage to come to a solution without upgrading to 6.2, and it went something like this:

1) Ouput a collection of type java.util.collection programatically into our process to populate a process variable

2) Use the process variable name in the collection expression for the multi-instance sub-process

3) Voila, parallel sub processes

We also had an issue with jbpm not recognizing our list type so we had to add JaxbListWrapper to our jbpm project.