Cleaning and/or removal of process variables of type Serializable

Support
#1

Good evening everyone, we need to know if there is a way to empty and/or modify a process variable of type Serializable. I should mention that the Jmix version we are using is 2.1.1 .
As shown in the attachment, we are unable to empty the process variable actualGroups, in fact the popup shows the phrase ‘I cannot create the Edit component’. Is there any way to force this operation? Is it possible to intervene directly via DB? Other?

Thank you in advance for your availability
actualGroupsPopup
actualGroups

#2

Hello,

is this process active? If the process is finished (complete) you can not edit a variable like this, only directly in database, bypassing Flowable API.

Kind regards,
Mladen

#3

Hi Mladen, thank you for your quick reply. Yes, the process is still active. How can I proceed in this case?

Best regards

#4

Hello,
I too have some serializable variables in my processes and I gave it a look - and indeed I can not edit them, active process instance or not.
The story goes like this:

  • Serializable type in Flowable is meant to store complex Java objects (that implement java.io.Serializable) as variables
  • when Flowable saves such variable, it is serialized into binary format and stored in bytearray table, and references are both in historic and runtime tables
    → so to edit such a variable stored in binary format, you would need to know what it is and have a custom editor, because it can be many things

What exactly is your variable? Is it some sort of a list? How did you define it? Can you use a long string instead maybe?
If not, then you will need to extend/override the edit screen and add some code to display the editor for your case.

Kind regards,
Mladen