Flowable 3.9.x Release Notes
Initial release 3.9.0, March 25, 2021
Introduction
The Flowable product comprises:
- 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.
- Flowable Inspect, a debugging and test component that can be used with Flowable Work and Engage.
These products are built on top of the Flowable Open Source project which can be found at Github.
Documentation
The Flowable Open Source project also has extensive documentation available which can be found at https://flowable.org/documentation.html.
Highlights
Flowable Work Services
Add support to define a variable aggregation configuration on multi instance elements on BPMN activities and repetition CMMN plan item definitions. A new collection variable can be constructed and variables and expressions can be defined to create the item objects in the collection.
Added support for method overloading in JUEL / backend expressions. The method lookup logic now takes into account the parameter types to find the correct method. This for example can be used in expressions with JSON objects using the Jackson API like ${myJsonObject.put('test', 1)}.
The Flowable Database Configuration property has been enhanced to support creating multiple properties for a given namespace + name + tenantId combination. Additionally it also supports setting an owner (through identity links).
Added support for using a request body in DELETE REST API calls in the service registry engine.
Flowable Work User Interface
Added support for user favourites in data tables. Each user can store the state of a data table with filtering, sorting, column ordering and column sizing in a user favourite and make it available as the default config for that table for a user or make it available as a quick link so it's easily accessible.
Improve support for multiple action buttons in different sub forms of a parent form. Action ids won't conflict with each other anymore.
When the dynamic values of an url changes for an autoexecute button it will be executed again, if the autoexecute expression evaluates to true.
The labs view to enable/disable features is only available when a feature flag labs is present.
Added option to disable the forms debug option with a feature flag disableFormsDebug.
The database content storage functionality can now be enabled with a property flowable.content.storage.type=db.
Flowable Engage
Added a Line adapter to support sending messages to and receiving messages from Line.
Added support for incoming messages to not update the unread count of conversation filters and added option to prevent a conversation for an incoming message to move to the top. This is mainly useful for digital agent or other system messages that don't need the attention of Engage users.
Added support for sending and receiving images for WeChat.
The conversation message box can be disabled when the conversation has a tag that is configured with the flowable.frontend.engageReadOnlyTags property. Also the alwaysLoadConversation feature flag needs to enabled to make sure the conversation tags are loaded on every conversation click.
Flowable Design
Added support for defining more than one tag on a model. Previously it was only possible to define one tag. It's also possible to search on models with a one or more tags in the list views.
When locking a model, the latest state for that model will be retrieved to make sure that the Design user always works with the latest model state.
Improved performance of opening models within apps that have a lot of model references.
Improved the handling of large model repositories with paging.
Flowable Control
Added a system information section that shows environment info and job info. In the environment info view information about the DB connection pool, the license, memory usage, logging config and more is shown. In the job info view the async, timer and history job information is shown, together with the task and async executor information.
In the environment info view the functionality to change the DB connection pool settings like max pool size is added.
In the job info view the it's possible to change the async executor configuration for the BPMN, CMMN and history async executors.
Added a license check for Flowable Control. There's a new property to set the license check to be database based with: flowable.control.app.db-store-enabled=true. When the database based license check is used, then the license needs to be uploaded via the settings menu available in the left bottom of Flowable Control. There's also the option to use file based license checks, similar to Flowable Design. A license with Flowable Control or Flowable Design or Flowable Work or Flowable Engage is needed to make the license check work in Control.
Upgrade information
The ServiceInvocationBuilder#invoke() method has a new type (ServiceInvocationResultResponse) that will contain the mapped values. In case you need to access the result returned by the low level service invoker you can get a hold of it through ServiceInvocationResultResponse#getServiceInvocationResponse.
Due to the changes for the ConfigurationProperty the ConfigurationService#createConfigurationPropertyBuilder(String, String) will always create a new property. Review your usages and change the updates to ConfigurationService#createUpdateConfigurationPropertyBuilder(String).
Database changes
The unique constraint FLW_UQ_CON_PROP_TENANT_NS_NAME from the FLW_CONFIGURATION_PROPERTY table has been removed and has been replaced with a normal index FLW_CON_PROP_NS_NAME_TENANT on the namespace, name and tenant id.
The type of the NAME_ column from the FLW_CONFIGURATION_PROPERTY table has been changed from varchar(64) to varchar(255)
Spring Boot
- Base Spring Boot version should be upgraded to at least 2.4.4
Open Source Artifacts Dependency Compatibility
Releases of Flowable Design, Work and Engage use versions of the open source Flowable dependencies that have not yet been published publicly on the Maven Central repository. These 'bugfix releases' can be retrieved by customers using the customer Flowable Maven repository credentials.
These versions contain fixes and have been QA'ed with the 3.9.0 release.
It's advised to upgrade your open source dependendencies to the 'compatible' version mentioned below (and mentioned in the subsequent Service Packs section)
Open source dependency version: 6.6.1.12
Service Packs
3.9.1
Fixed issue with manually typing in a date with defined date formatting e.g. DD.MM.YYYY.
Fixed issue with migrating existing model tags in Flowable Design from a version before 3.9.0.
Solved issue with slow loading job views in Control with improved definition loading.
Fixed issue with importing edoras one models with a property using an expression with [[myExpression]] syntax.
Open source dependency version: 6.6.1.12