RE: [bpel4people] BP-38: Comment propagation

["Michael Rowley" <michael.rowley@activevos.com>]

 

Here are notes from the F2F discussion of this issue:

 

We talked about having a different approach to sharing comments among people activities.  Rather than having to explicitly mark comment propagation flows, it was thought that it is preferable to model sharing by marking a scope with @shareComments=true.  This would apply to all activities within the scope and all inner scopes.  Inner scopes cannot override sharing, as that would overly complicate the model).  However, individual activities can opt out of sharing (perhaps a @dontShareComments attribute).

 

Runtimes should allow individual comments to be marked as to whether they should propagate.  It should be an enumeration, even if it starts with only two values (private & public)

 

Comments propagate after the task completes.  Propagated comments also propagate metadata (createdBy, lastModifiedBy, etc.)

 

If getComments is called on a task that is inside an event handler or parallel foreach (where there may be multiple parallel instances), then the result will depend on where the getComments call is made from.  If the getComments call is made from within the parallelized scope, then it will return only the comments associated with the scope instance that it is part of.  If the getComments call is made from outside of that scope, then it returns a union of all of the comments from every parallel instance of the task.

 

Michael Rowley

 

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From: Luc Clement [mailto:luc.clement@activevos.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 6:48 PM
To: bpel4people@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [bpel4people] BP-38: Comment propagation

 

Assigned: http://www.osoa.org/jira/browse/BP-38

 

From: Michael Rowley [mailto:michael.rowley@activevos.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 17:25
To: bpel4people@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [bpel4people] NEW ISSUE: Comment propagation

 

 

TARGET: BPEL4People

 

DESCRIPTION:

 

Sometimes the comments that are collected during the execution of one people activity need to be visible to people working on later people activities.   This is not currently possible.

 

It also should be possible to access the comments of a task from XPath expressions in the B4P process.  This would make it possible to record the comments in some other document.

 

PROPOSED RESOLUTION:

 

Introduce a new child element of a people activity:

 

<b4p:propagateCommentsFrom>

    <b4p:activityRef>peopleActivityName</b4p:activityRef>*

</b4p:propagateCommentsFrom>

 

This causes any comments that are present on the named people activities to be copied into the context of the target activity at the time that the target activity becomes ready to execute.  If more than one activity in the process has a name referenced from a <b4p:activityRef> element, then all matching activities have their comments propagated.  Since comment IDs are unique only within a single task, when comments are propagated they may get new IDs. 

 

We should also add a new XPath function “b4p:getComments(activityName)”, which returns the comments for a task using WS-HT’s existing tComment type.

 

To support these changes, the tHumantTaskContext type needs to change to include a <comments> child element, analogous to the <attachments> element.