Advanced Process Integration Tips -Choosing a Runtime Strategy Wisely

Using advanced process integration techniques becomes essential as you evolve your developer skills while integrating more and more of your business workflows. Let's take a closer look at what runtime strategies are available for your process automation projects and how to choose the right one for your needs.

It all starts with the core process engine, called Kie Server, and it can be configured to deal differently with the requests it receives and the objects it stores in memory or in the database. Properly configuring how the engine deals with the objects in memory, ensures a project with fewer resource consumption and avoids unexpected behaviors.

Runtime Strategy configuration affects directly how the engine deals with the lifecycle of the Kie Sessions and objects loaded in memory.

You have four options for your runtime strategy, for each new project deployment you create a:

• Singleton
• Per Process
• Per Request
• Per Case

Choosing a strategy

Understanding the key concepts of each strategy helps in guiding your choice of when you should use each of them:

Singleton Runtime Strategy: If you create and deploy a project, this runtime strategy configuration is used by default. This strategy uses a single Kie Session. This makes things easier for beginners since every inserted object is available in the same Kie Session. Also, the process engine persists the Kie Session and it's reused if the server restarts. Rule execution within processes can be impacted by the chosen strategy, sometimes in unexpected ways. 

Consider this: if process instance A inserts person John to be evaluated by business rules. Process instance B, inserts Maria. Later, when process C fires rules for its own person, John and Maria will still be in memory and will be evaluated by process C rules improperly!

When using this configuration, process execution happens within a synchronized Runtime Engine: it is thread-safe. Consequently, this characteristic can affect and bring consequences on performance. If you expect a high workload, or if the project use timers or signals in the process definitions, you may want to consider a different strategy for your production environment.

Per Request Strategy: defines a stateless behavior. The engine will create one Kie Session per request and destroy it at the end. The Kie Session will not be persisted. This is a good choice for high workload environments. 

Consider this: Consider two requests executed simultaneously to interact with the same process instance. One of the two requests might lock a database row to update it, and the other request might try to update it as well. This will lead to an OptimisticLockException.

This strategy might make the implementation more challenging if your project uses timers events or if the process involves business rule tasks.

Per Process Instance Strategy: recommended when your process uses timers and business rule tasks. The Kie Session is created when the process instance starts, and it dies, when the process instance ends. This is usually adequate for most use cases.

Keep in mind: creating Kie Bases is an expensive operation. Creating new Kie Sessions is cheap.

The engine stores the Kie Session in the database, and always use the same Kie Session for the same process instances.

Per Case: this strategy should be used if you are using a Case Management project. If you create a new Case Project, this strategy is selected by default. The Kie Session will last while the case is still opened (active).

Now, let's check the possible places to configure Runtime Strategies, and when should each one be used.

Choosing where to configure

Container Level: Affects the deployed kjar. Configuration can be made in Kie Containers using Business Central via the Execution Servers page.

Project level: The configuration will affect only this project. Configuration can be done via Business Central in the XML file or via. Inside the file src/main/resources/META-INF/kie-deployment-descriptor.xml the following configuration is present: SINGLETON

Server level: No UI Available. A new system property needs to be configured pointing to the new file.

This change will impact all projects from this server. A new deployment-descriptor.xml needs to be provided with all the tags and components (not only the ones which you want to customize). The system property is org.kie.deployment.desc.location and its value must point to a valid accessible file:  file:/path/to/file/deployment-descriptor.xml 

[INFO] If using the server level configuration, make sure to provide a valid XML file. See more details about the configuration in the official documentation, topic default deployment descriptor

Finally, considering that we can configure the runtime strategy in three different places, this is how the precedence works by default: 

• Container configuration overrides KJar and Server configs. 
• KJar configuration overrides Server configs.

This article should give you some ideas around the strategies you have available to you for your runtime and also provide you with an understanding of where you can set them up to best serve your project needs.