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Flowable 3.6.x Release Notes

Initial release: March 9, 2020

Introduction​

The Flowable product comprises:

  • Flowable Platform, a headless process and case management platform.
  • Flowable Work, a process and case management platform with an out-of-the-box user interface.
  • Flowable Engage, built on top of Flowable Work, adding conversations and external connectivity to WeChat, Whatsapp and others.
  • Flowable Design, a modeling environment to create BPMN, CMMN, DMN, Form and other model types that run in Platform/Work/Engage.
  • Flowable Control, an administration tool that can be used to manage the Flowable Platform / Work / Engage environments.

These products are built on top of the Flowable Open Source project which can be found on Github.

Documentation​

The Flowable Open Source project also has extensive documentation available which can be found at https://www.flowable.com/open-source/docs/oss-introduction.

Highlights​

Flowable Platform​

  • The new Event Registry engine that was added as a new engine in Flowable recently is now also available in Flowable Platform. Out-of-the-box support is available for sending and receiving events with ActiveMQ / JMS, Kafka and RabbitMQ channels. Channels can be extended with other types as well.

  • Added out-of-the-box support for using LDAP for authentication and authorization. By providing the LDAP server url, user query, group query etc. in the Spring properties / environment variables the LDAP configuration can be defined. When enabling LDAP, the user and group queries will be performed against LDAP instead of the Flowable user and group database tables.

  • Added additional options in the security policy model to define permissions for identity links and documents.

  • Master data values can be initialized / updated when the application starts as part of the bootup logic.

  • Added more support for the same deployment functionality for model references. This means that it can be configured if the same parent deployment version of a model reference should be used or instead the latest version available of that model should be used. For example for sub process definitions or forms this is an important option.

  • The service registry engine now also supports PATCH http calls.

  • Support for java.time.LocalDate and java.time.LocalDateTime as variable type has been added.

  • Platform has been upgraded to Spring Boot 2.2.

Flowable Work​

  • Support has been added to edit Office Documents with the new WebDav functionality. This allows users to open an Office document, e.g. a Word document, from the document library, edit it locally in Word, and then the save action will make sure the updated document is saved back to the document library.

  • The Rich text form field content can now be used in a Document template and an Email template. The format that is used in the Rich text field will be kept in the Document and Email template. When using the HTML mode of the Rich text form field more formatting options are available then with the Markdown mode.

  • Sub forms are now also supported for Pages. This means that Pages can have sub form components that reference another Form model.

  • A major effort was done to improve the internalization support in Flowable Work for dynamic / flexible texts. For example action names, stage names, process / case / task names, manual activation task names etc.

  • The case page view switches to a mobile view automatically when a mobile device is detected. Also the accessibility of the Work application in general has been improved.

  • The Documents and People (identity links) tab permissions can now be controlled by a Security Policy model.

  • Outcome buttons are now also supported on forms that trigger an Action (a so-called init Action form).

  • When changing the assignee for a case / process / task the list of potential assignee users can now be controlled with a candidates type property in Flowable Design. The options are all users, only candidates, only owner or all identity links.

  • A new permission has been added to the security policy model to control which roles have the ability to edit the task name.

  • A feature flag has been added to use the browser language, instead of the configured language for a user.

Flowable Engage​

  • The conversation view switches to a mobile view automatically when a mobile device is detected.

  • Support has been added for replies to messages in WhatsApp.

  • The search in Engage now also supports to search on emojis.

  • Synchronize read state between WhatsApp and Engage. In order for Engage read state to work read WhatsApp Prerequisites and explicitly enable it in Engage.

Flowable Design​

  • The app model view has been refactored to a single view instead of separation of the details and edit view. There are also filtering options added and the navigation from the app model view to other models and back has been improved.

  • New model types for event and channel models have been added to support the new Event Registry engine. The event and channel models can be referenced from BPMN and CMMN models with for example the Event registry start event and Send event task in BPMN and the Generic event listener and Send event task in CMMN.

  • All model types are now opened as a tab in the editor. This makes it easier to work on multiple models at the same time, and reduces issues with navigation.

  • A refactoring was done to rely on model keys instead of model database ids for model references, for example for a BPMN user task to a form model. The main reason is that this enables improved multi tenant support in Design and the ability to override a default tenant model with a specific tenant model without problems. In addition, it's also easier to share models between different Design databases because the model references are now based model keys.

  • The tenant switcher which could already be enabled in Design with the flowable.modeler.app.tenant.list-provider property and used for admin users is productised. A list of tenants can be defined and then an admin user can easily switch between tenants when required.

  • Added the possibility to define a tag for a model, to be able to set a release / version identifier for a specific model.

  • The model reference component has been added to models where other models are references, like the action form in an action model.

  • The init variables task element UI has been enhanced with types support and has improved JSON support.

  • Design has been upgraded to Spring Boot 2.2.

Flowable Control​

  • Support for the Event Registry engine has been added.

  • Event subscriptions are now shown for process and case instances and the relationship to an event definition is shown when applicable.

  • Control has been upgraded to Spring Boot 2.2.

Upgrade information​

Actions needed when upgrading​

  • Frontend customization: The application logo is customized by overwriting certain CSS classes. The dom structure has changed and the flw-switchernav class has been replaced with flw-switchernavlogo. To change the logo based on the menu collapsed status use the selector ".flw-switchernavcollapsed .flw-switchernavlogo" flw-loginlogo class added to the login page allows a developer to customize the logo.

  • Optionally reindex: tasks, case-instances, process-instances and work indices. The reload is needed if sorting on name is needed for old tasks, case instances, process instances and work data.

  • Custom index aliases or custom queries using rawValue (variable property) cannot use rawValue anymore. Instead, use one of the dedicated value properties such as textValue, textValueKeyword, numberValue, etc.

  • The REST API endpoint /action-repository/action-definitions/{scopeType}/{scopeId} has been changed to /action-repository/scoped-action-definitions/{scopeType}/{scopeId}.

Service Packs​

3.6.1​

  • Enabled historic view of custom case views and add a save button to the case page task view.

  • Enable change of the badge of a case, process, task or case page in the custom case view.

  • Enable case task to BPMN diagram generator and add event registry send task to BPMN and CMMN diagram JS component.

  • Enable support for completing and saving task forms to the Flowable Core REST API, for Flowable Core customers.

  • Enable option to add custom types to form properties and enabled the Enum form property for a start event.

  • For DMN hit policies Rule Order and Output Order the result variable is now an array by default. In the CMMN and BPMN engine there is an alwaysUseArraysForDmnMultiHitPolicies property to disable this change for these hit policies.

  • Fix issue with create SQL script for Microsoft SQL Server for Flowable Design and the upgrade SQL script for Flowable Work / Engage.

  • Enable manual SQL scripts for Flowable Design and Control.

  • Upgraded Flowable Forms React component for Flowable Design and Flowable Work / Engage.

  • Updated PDF viewer for IE to include a print option.

3.6.2​

  • Fix for PDF JS viewer for IE 11 and other browser not supporting an embedded PDF viewer

  • Engage mobile view fix for passing text to the message text box

  • Fix for JSON array variables in task forms for the Flowable Core REST API

3.6.3​

  • Fixed backward compatibility issue with expressions referring to non existing nested JSON properties

  • Fixed issue with template approval

  • Fixed issue with long app import in Design

  • Fixed issue with ‘editConversationAvatator’ flag

3.6.4​

  • Fixed permission issues with accessing a task form with content items that were added in a previous task

  • Fixed issue for getting users through the REST API on Oracle

  • Fixed issue with saving a large amount of content items in one variable (through an attachment form field)

  • Fixed issue with lagging rich text editor when having a very large text

  • Fixed issue with using a + character or %2B in a HTTP task URL

3.6.5​

  • Fixed permission issue with content items that were uploaded in another form like a start form or task form. When a user has access to the current task form, the content items of the form can be accessed.

  • Fixed issue with emoticons when emoticon fonts are missing on the operating system. A forceEmojiFallback deployment feature property can be set to true and this forces the emoticon picker to use predefined emoticon images instead of the ones from the operating system.

3.6.6​

  • Added PlatformContentItemPermissionHandler interface to implement custom permission logic for content item access.

  • Fixed issue with data tables overlapping when positioned next to each other and not having the ability to view all data in the data table.