I think that automatic Process migration isn't something useful to
achieve. All process definitions have a background process that covers a
business need, and that cannot be expressed there. So, even when in the
new definition there exists the same activity unmodified, you can't be
sure that the best option is to kept instances in this step.
So, IMO perhaps a better option could be to have some tool that helps in
migration tasks, allowing to define source and targets activities for
process instances. But I repeat: that helps a person that understands
the business to do it, and not that tries to do it by itself. It could
automatically do a suggestion, but no more than this.
Regards,
Tammo van Lessen wrote:
Hi,
Matthieu Riou wrote:
On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Rafal Rusin <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello,
recently I added feature request:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ODE-483
It's about adding save/load process instances to/from XML in management
API.
I'd like to hear from you, what's the best solution from your (user's)
perspective.
This is a pretty hard problem. Saving and reloading the instance state is
the easy part, migrating it to a new definition is where it gets hairy.
Generally speaking, automagically migrating any process definition to a any
new one is impossible, too many cases are undecidable. So whichever tool
gets used to do that migration will need human input to know what to do in
all but simple cases (which might already be interesting). The question then
becomes how to describe a transformation from one process definition to
another. With a relational database you would use SQL to alter the schema
and update data. There's no equivalent for processes.
I'm not aware of much literature directly in that field although Tammo may
be able to point you to some papers.
Instance migration is definitely a non-trivial problem, though very
interesting. The guys in Ulm have done a lot of research in this field
[1], I think it is a good starting point (also to find related work).
Best,
Tammo
[1]http://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/institute-of-databases-and-information-systems/research/projects/adept2.html
--
Andrés P. Ferrando
http://www.pruna.com.ar/
