4.3.5. Journal and History

This module concerns the way in which the process data is stored during the process execution and archived when the execution is completed. This is indeed a crucial module in a process solution.

Nova Orchestra unifies journal data et history data as the underlying essence of both is to handle process data. For that to be done, we created the concept of process record. A record is a minimal set of attributes describing a process entity execution. That means that each process entity related to the execution has its own associated record.

Those records are recorded during the process execution and stored depending on the persistence service implementation (db, xml...). The Nova Orchestra API will retrieve record data from the records storage and sent them back to the users (meaning that records also acts as value objects in Nova Orchestra APIs).

As soon as a process instance is finished, a typical scenario would be (by default) to move instance related process data from the production environment to a history one. While the physical device and the data structure could changed from one process engine deployment to another (XML, BI database...), the internal format could remain the same (records). This is exactly what is happening in Nova Orchestra, when archiving data the engine just move execution records from the production to the history environment without data transformation in between.

Journal and history data are persisted in different database. Change hibernate.properties [hibernate-history.properties] file in conf directory to modify the journal [history] database