Deleting process instance tokens when a referenced task does not exist

In earlier releases of Business Automation Workflow, you could not delete process instance tokens if the task that the process refers to did not exist or the process did not contain tasks. However, a configurable property force-token-action has been introduced to let you delete these orphaned process instance tokens that have no associated tasks.

About this task

In the past, you could not delete process instance tokens if an associated task ID could not be found. A missing task ID can be caused by process instances that contain active tokens that are set on an event but the associated task no longer exists. In this situation, the tokens could not be deleted and a Task ID not found error occurred. Another situation that can occur is when a token is set on a flow line and an attempt is made to move or delete the token using the REST API. In this situation, a 200 success code is returned but the token is not actually removed.

However, you can now use the force-token-action setting to specify whether orphaned process instance tokens can be deleted when they do not have tasks. If true is specified (which is the default), you can delete process instance tokens that have no tasks. If false is specified, you cannot delete process instance tokens that have no tasks.

If you want to change the value for the setting, you can override the value by adding or updating the setting in your 100Custom.xml files. For example, to add the setting to a 100Custom.xml file, you would add the following elements under the <properties> element and modify the value as needed:

<server>
   <instance-migration merge="mergeChildren">
      <force-token-action merge="replace">true
      </force-token-action>
   </instance-migration>
</server>

For information about the individual 100Custom.xml files that need to be updated and their locations, see the topic Location of 100Custom configuration files.

However, to consistently and reliably change the value of the setting in all of the 100Custom.xml files in your Business Automation Workflow deployment environment, it is recommended that you use the updateBPMConfig command as described in the following procedure:

Procedure

  1. Stop the servers for Workflow Server and Workflow Center.
  2. Start the scripting client in disconnected mode as described in the topic updateBPMConfig command.
  3. Run the following commands to simultaneously update all affected servers: 
    wsadmin> AdminTask.updateBPMConfig( [ '-create', '/server' ] )
wsadmin> AdminTask.updateBPMConfig( [ '-create', '/server/instance-migration' ] )
wsadmin> AdminTask.updateBPMConfig( [ '-create', '/server/instance-migration/force-token-action', '-xNodeValue', 'true_or_false' ] )
wsadmin> AdminConfig.save()

    Replace the true_or_false variable with either true or false.

  4. Restart the servers.

Results

The recommended way of updating the 100Custom.xml files is by running the updateBPMConfig command. However, if the updates are unsuccessful, you can manually update the files by following the steps in the topic Creating a 100Custom.xml configuration file.