Configuration

Job worker configuration options

Job type

You can configure the job type via the JobWorker annotation:

@JobWorker(type = "foo")
public void handleJobFoo() {
  // handles jobs of type 'foo'
}

If you don't specify the type attribute, the method name is used by default if you enabled the -parameters compiler flag in the getting started section:

@JobWorker
public void foo() {
    // handles jobs of type 'foo'
}

As a third possibility, you can set a default job type:

zeebe.client.worker.default-type=foo

This is used for all workers that do not set a task type via the annotation.

Define variables to fetch

You can specify that you only want to fetch some variables (instead of all) when executing a job, which can decrease load and improve performance:

@JobWorker(type = "foo", fetchVariables={"variable1", "variable2"})
public void handleJobFoo(final JobClient client, final ActivatedJob job) {
  String variable1 = (String)job.getVariablesAsMap().get("variable1");
  System.out.println(variable1);
  // ...
}

Using @Variable

By using the @Variable annotation, there is a shortcut to make variable retrieval simpler and only fetch certain variables, making them available as parameters:

@JobWorker(type = "foo")
public void handleJobFoo(final JobClient client, final ActivatedJob job, @Variable(name = "variable1") String variable1) {
  System.out.println(variable1);
  // ...
}

If you don't specify the name attribute on the annotation, the method parameter name is used as the variable name if you enabled the -parameters compiler flag in the getting started section:

@JobWorker(type = "foo")
public void handleJobFoo(final JobClient client, final ActivatedJob job, @Variable String variable1) {
  System.out.println(variable1);
  // ...
}

With @Variable or fetchVariables you limit which variables are loaded from the workflow engine. You can also override this and force that all variables are loaded anyway:

@JobWorker(type = "foo", fetchAllVariables = true)
public void handleJobFoo(final JobClient client, final ActivatedJob job, @Variable String variable1) {
}

Using @VariablesAsType

You can also use your own class into which the process variables are mapped to (comparable to getVariablesAsType() in the Java client API). Therefore, use the @VariablesAsType annotation. In the example below, MyProcessVariables refers to your own class:

@JobWorker(type = "foo")
public ProcessVariables handleFoo(@VariablesAsType MyProcessVariables variables){
  // do whatever you need to do
  variables.getMyAttributeX();
  variables.setMyAttributeY(42);

  // return variables object if something has changed, so the changes are submitted to Zeebe
  return variables;
}

Fetch variables via Job

You can access variables of a process via the ActivatedJob object, which is passed into the method if it is a parameter:

@JobWorker(type = "foo")
public void handleJobFoo(final ActivatedJob job) {
  String variable1 = (String)job.getVariablesAsMap().get("variable1");
  System.out.println(variable1);
  // ...
}

Auto-completing jobs

By default, the autoComplete attribute is set to true for any job worker.

In this case, the Spring integration will handle job completion for you:

@JobWorker(type = "foo")
public void handleJobFoo(final ActivatedJob job) {
  // do whatever you need to do
  // no need to call client.newCompleteCommand()...
}

This is the same as:

@JobWorker(type = "foo", autoComplete = true)
public void handleJobFoo(final ActivatedJob job) {
  // ...
}

note

The code within the handler method needs to be synchronously executed, as the completion will be triggered right after the method has finished.

When using autoComplete you can:

• Return a Map, String, InputStream, or Object, which will then be added to the process variables.
• Throw a ZeebeBpmnError, which results in a BPMN error being sent to Zeebe.
• Throw any other Exception that leads in a failure handed over to Zeebe.

@JobWorker(type = "foo")
public Map<String, Object> handleJobFoo(final ActivatedJob job) {
  // some work
  if (successful) {
    // some data is returned to be stored as process variable
    return variablesMap;
  } else {
   // problem shall be indicated to the process:
   throw new ZeebeBpmnError("DOESNT_WORK", "This does not work because...");
  }
}

Programmatically completing jobs

Your job worker code can also complete the job itself. This gives you more control over when exactly you want to complete the job (for example, allowing the completion to be moved to reactive callbacks):

@JobWorker(type = "foo", autoComplete = false)
public void handleJobFoo(final JobClient client, final ActivatedJob job) {
  // do whatever you need to do
  client.newCompleteCommand(job.getKey())
     .send()
     .exceptionally( throwable -> { throw new RuntimeException("Could not complete job " + job, throwable); });
}

Ideally, you don't use blocking behavior like send().join(), as this is a blocking call to wait for the issues command to be executed on the workflow engine. While this is very straightforward to use and produces easy-to-read code, blocking code is limited in terms of scalability.

This is why the worker above showed a different pattern (using exceptionally). Often, you might also want to use the whenComplete callback:

send().whenComplete((result, exception) -> {})

This registers a callback to be executed if the command on the workflow engine was executed or resulted in an exception. This allows for parallelism. This is discussed in more detail in this blog post about writing good workers for Camunda 8.

note

When completing jobs programmatically, you must specify autoComplete = false. Otherwise, there is a race condition between your programmatic job completion and the Spring integration job completion, and this can lead to unpredictable results.

@CustomHeaders

You can use the @CustomHeaders annotation for a parameter to retrieve custom headers for a job:

@JobWorker(type = "foo")
public void handleFoo(@CustomHeaders Map<String, String> headers){
  // do whatever you need to do
}

You can combine annotations. For example, @VariablesAsType and @CustomHeaders.

@JobWorker
public ProcessVariables foo(@VariablesAsType ProcessVariables variables, @CustomHeaders Map<String, String> headers){
  // do whatever you need to do
  return variables;
}

Throwing ZeebeBpmnErrors

Whenever your code hits a problem that should lead to a BPMN error being raised, you can throw a ZeebeBpmnError to provide the error code used in BPMN:

@JobWorker(type = "foo")
public void handleJobFoo() {
  // some work
  if (!successful) {
   // problem shall be indicated to the process:
   throw new ZeebeBpmnError("DOESNT_WORK", "This does not work because...");
  }
}

Additional configuration options

Configuring Self-Managed Zeebe connection

zeebe.client.broker.grpcAddress=http://127.0.0.1:26500
zeebe.client.broker.restAddress=http://127.0.0.1:8080
zeebe.client.security.plaintext=true

Configure different cloud environments

If you don't connect to the Camunda 8 SaaS production environment, you might have to also adjust these properties:

zeebe.client.cloud.base-url=zeebe.camunda.io
zeebe.client.cloud.port=443
zeebe.client.cloud.auth-url=https://login.cloud.camunda.io/oauth/token

As an alternative, you can use the Zeebe client environment variables.

Default task type

If you build a worker that only serves one thing, it might also be handy to define the worker job type globally and not in the annotation:

zeebe.client.worker.defaultType=foo

Configure jobs in flight and thread pool

Number of jobs that are polled from the broker to be worked on in this client and thread pool size to handle the jobs:

zeebe.client.worker.max-jobs-active=32
zeebe.client.worker.threads=1

For a full set of configuration options, see ZeebeClientConfigurationProperties.java.

note

We generally do not advise using a thread pool for workers, but rather implement asynchronous code, see writing good workers for additional details.

Disable worker

You can disable workers via the enabled parameter of the @JobWorker annotation:

class SomeClass {
  @JobWorker(type = "foo", enabled = false)
  public void handleJobFoo() {
    // worker's code - now disabled
  }
}

You can also override this setting via your application.properties file:

zeebe.client.worker.override.foo.enabled=false

This is especially useful if you have a bigger code base including many workers, but want to start only some of them. Typical use cases are:

• Testing: You only want one specific worker to run at a time.
• Load balancing: You want to control which workers run on which instance of cluster nodes.
• Migration: There are two applications, and you want to migrate a worker from one to another. With this switch, you can disable workers via configuration in the old application once they are available within the new.

Overriding JobWorker values via configuration file

You can override the JobWorker annotation's values, as you can see in the example above where the enabled property is overridden:

zeebe.client.worker.override.foo.enabled=false

In this case, foo is the type of the worker that we want to customize.

You can override all supported configuration options for a worker, for example:

zeebe.client.worker.override.foo.timeout=10000

You could also provide a custom class that can customize the JobWorker configuration values by implementing the io.camunda.zeebe.spring.client.annotation.customizer.ZeebeWorkerValueCustomizer interface.

Enable job streaming

Read more about this feature in the job streaming documentation.

To enable job streaming on the Zeebe client, you can configure it:

zeebe.client.default-job-worker-stream-enabled=true

Control tenant usage

When using multi-tenancy, the Zeebe client will connect to the <default> tenant. To control this, you can configure:

zeebe.client.default-job-worker-tenant-ids=myTenant

Additionally, you can set tenant IDs on the job worker level by using the annotation:

@JobWorker(tenantIds="myOtherTenant")

You can override this property as well:

zeebe.client.worker.override.tenant-ids=myThirdTenant

Observing metrics

The Spring Zeebe SDK provides some out-of-the-box metrics that can be leveraged via Spring Actuator. Whenever actuator is on the classpath, you can access the following metrics:

• camunda.job.invocations: Number of invocations of job workers (tagging the job type)

For all of those metrics, the following actions are recorded:

• activated: The job/Connector was activated and started to process an item.
• completed: The processing was completed successfully.
• failed: The processing failed with some exception.
• bpmn-error: The processing completed by throwing a BPMN error (which means there was no technical problem).

In a default setup, you can enable metrics to be served via http:

management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=metrics

Access them via http://localhost:8080/actuator/metrics/.