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Version: 8.9 (unreleased)

Resolve incidents and update variables

Learn how to resolve incidents and update variables in Camunda 8 Operate.

Overview​

Every process instance created for the order-process.bpmn process model requires an orderValue so the XOR gateway evaluation will happen properly.

Let’s look at a case where orderValue is present and was set as a string, but our order-process.bpmn model required an integer to properly evaluate the orderValue and route the instance.

Before you begin​

To follow this guide, install zbctl, a community-supported command line interface for interacting with Camunda 8.

Create a process instance​

Create a process instance with an orderValue of "99":

./bin/zbctl --insecure create instance order-process --variables '{"orderId": "1234", "orderValue":"99"}'

Advance an instance to an XOR gateway​

To advance the instance to our XOR gateway, we’ll create a job worker to complete the Initiate Payment task:

./bin/zbctl --insecure create worker initiate-payment --handler cat

We’ll publish a message that will be correlated with the instance, so we can advance past the Payment Received intermediate message catch event:

./bin/zbctl --insecure publish message "payment-received" --correlationKey="1234"

In the Operate interface, you should now observe the process instance has an incident, which means there’s a problem with process execution that must be fixed before the process instance can progress to the next step.

Diagnosing and resolving incidents​

Operate provides tools for diagnosing and resolving incidents. Let’s go through incident diagnosis and resolution step by step.

When we inspect the process instance, we can observe exactly what our incident is:

  1. Click the Process Instance Key for the process stuck on the Order Value? node.
  2. At the top of the instance detail page, click View to view the incident details.
  3. Observe the error message:
Expected result of the expression 'orderValue >= 100' to be 'BOOLEAN', but was 'NULL'. The evaluation reported the following warnings:
[NOT_COMPARABLE] Can't compare '"99"' with '100'

To resolve this incident, we must edit the orderValue variable so it’s an integer. To do so, take the following steps:

  1. Under Variables, click the edit icon next to the orderValue variable.
  2. Edit the variable by removing the quotation marks.
  3. Click the checkmark icon to save the change.

We were able to solve this particular problem by editing a variable, but it’s worth noting you can also add a variable if a variable is missing from a process instance altogether.

There’s one last step: initiating a “retry” of the process instance. Click the retry icon in the top right corner of the page.

You should now see the incident has been resolved, and the process instance has progressed to the next step.

Complete a process instance​

If you’d like to complete the process instance, create a worker for the Ship Without Insurance task:

./bin/zbctl --insecure create worker ship-without-insurance --handler cat