Stardust Release 3.1.0

Release 3.1.0 is a combined feature and maintenance release.

Supported Platforms

The following tables list all supported micro versions for:

Note
We do not expect any problems in all micro versions covered in the following tables of supported platforms, but we cannot strictly guarantee correct end-to-end system functionality in other platform versions than the Reference Test Platforms, as bugs in the platform code and problems introduced by combining different unforeseen micro-level versions of the different platform components could in rare cases introduce incorrect system behavior that is beyond our control. Refer to section Reference Test Platforms for a list of fine grained version information for our regression test platforms.

Supported Portal Platforms

The Stardust portals are currently supported on the following user agents:

User Agents Supported Versions
Internet Explorer (except Web Modeler and Rules Management perspectives) 10, 11 (in IE 10 mode)
Mozilla Firefox 41 (note that future browser releases are not tested with Stardust yet and might cause issues)
Google Chrome 46 (note that future browser releases are not tested with Stardust yet and might cause issues)

Supported Database Servers

The following database servers are currently supported by Stardust:

Server Supported Versions
Oracle 11g R1 (11.1.0.6.0) (deprecated), 11g R2 (11.2.0.1.0), 12.1.1 (12c)
DB2 UDB 9.7
Derby 10.9.1.0
MySQL 5.6
Sybase ASE 15.7
SQL Server 2008, 2012

Supported Application Servers

The following application servers are currently supported by Stardust:

Server Supported Versions
IBM WebSphere 8 (8.0.0.5 or later)
Oracle WebLogic 10.3.6, 12c Release 1
JBoss 7.1, EAP 6.3, EAP 6.4
Jakarta Tomcat 7

If you don't see your favorite database or application server in this list, please send a request to us. We continuously update the list of supported databases and application servers.

Supported Java Runtime

Vendor Supported Version
Oracle, Sun Java SE 6
Oracle 1.7.x, 1.8.x
IBM 32 Bit JRE 6.0 (together with WebSphere 8)
Oracle JRockit 6 (together with Oracle 11g application server)

Other System Dependencies

Vendor Supported Version
Spring 3.2.4
Jackrabbit 2.6.1
Hazelcast 2.4

Reference Test Platforms

The following tables provide fine grained version information for our regression test platforms.

Reference Test Database Servers

The following database servers are currently tested as reference:

Server Supported Versions
Oracle 11g R1 (11.1.0.6.0), 11g R2 (11.2.0.1.0), 11g-XE, 12c (12.1.1)
DB2 UDB 9.7.5
Derby 10.9.1.0
MySQL 5.6
Sybase ASE 15.7
SQL Server 2012

Reference Test Application Servers

The following application servers are currently tested as reference:

Server Supported Versions
IBM WebSphere 8.0.0.9
Oracle WebLogic 10.3.6, 12.1.2, 12.1.3
JBoss 7.1.1, EAP 6.3.0, 6.4.0
Jakarta Tomcat 7.0.63

New Features and Improvements

The following new features and bug fixes have been introduced with this release:

Support for Benchmark Definition

With this release Stardust supports the definition of Benchmarks to assess status and progress of Processes and display the same in monitoring views like Traffic Light Views and Gantt Charts.

For details on using Benchmarks, please refer to chapter Benchmarks of the Concepts handbook.

However, note that the Traffic Light View provided in the Control Center perspective is for customer Technology Preview purpose only. Note that it may not be functionally complete and is not intended for production use.

New Global Permissions

The following new global permissions have been introduced:

Please refer to chapter Declarative Security Usage in Stardust Services API in the Programming Guide for details on the usage of these permissions in the Stardust services.

Correspondence Feature to generate Correspondence from pre-defined Templates

Stardust introduces a new Correspondence feature, which leverages Process Instance data to generate correspondence from pre-defined templates.

Please refer to chapter Creating Correspondence for details.

Transition of the Stardust Portal UI to HTML(5) Technologies (ongoing)

With this release, a transition of the Stardust Portal UI to HTML(5) technologies has been performed.

ICEfaces/JSF-based components are replaced by a new Portal Shell and a new HTML(5)-based development has been introduced.

Please note that some parts of this process are still in progress. Screenshots have not been replaced for all UI components in this release yet.

New Auditor Role for read-only Authorization

This release introduces a new Auditor role, which gives read-only authorization to view all processing aspects of the workflow in the Stardust Portal.

A user who has the Auditor role is able to view perspectives, views, workflows, workflow artifacts and documents. The Auditor role is similar to the Administrator role but is used to provide participants with read-only access, whereas the Administrator role provides full access.

General Portal Enhancements

Multiple enhancements have been introduced in the Stardust Portal with this release, most importantly:

Participant Manager View enhancements

The Participant Manager has been reworked. It provides support for the new Auditor role and is enhanced for usability.

Please refer to chapters Creating and Editing User Accounts and Associating Users with Roles or Organizations in the End User Handbook for details.

Authorization Manager View enhancements

The Authorization Manager has been reworked. It provides support for the new Allow and Deny authorization and is enhanced for usability.

Please refer to chapter Managing Authorization in the End User Handbook for details.

Business Modeler Enhancements

The Business Modeler has been updated with the following enhancements:

Technology Preview for Importing and Exporting Audit Trail Information

Support to import and export Audit Trail information via console command, API and Process Portal scheduler is provided as technology preview in this release. Note that this preview may not be functionally complete and is not intended for production use.

For details on this functionality please refer to chapter Importing and Exporting Audit Trail Information.

Business Process Modeler Preview Functionality

The following functionality of the Business Process Modeler has been introduced as or is still customer technology preview only. Note that these previews may not be functionally complete and are not intended for production use.

The Stardust Portal provides a configuration switch to show or hide features that are provided as technology preview.

New Features and Bug Fixes

The following main features and bug fixes have been introduced with this release:

Bug-ID Description
Bug 485689 Technology Preview for Importing and Exporting Audit Trail Information
Bug 485688 Business Modeler Enhancements
Bug 485687 General Portal Enhancements
Bug 485686 Transition of Portal UI to HTML(5) Technologies (ongoing)
Bug 485685 Correspondence Feature to generate Correspondence from pre-defined Templates
Bug 485684 New Global Permissions
Bug 485683 Support for Benchmark Definition
Bug 473724 Create modeler upgrade job
Bug 473467 Upgrade Stardust to 3.1.0 - Adjust Facet Versions
Bug 473465 Upgrade example models to 3.1.0
Bug 473463 Create Runtime upgrade job from version 3.0.1 to 3.1.0
Bug 468768 Activity Overview: Gateway is shown as Activity in Activity overview

Stardust API Changes

Deprecated API

The following API methods are deprecated:

API Changes

The following API changes have been performed with this release:

New execution permission startProcesses

A new execution permission startProcesses is introduced to allow to start a new process instance.

Method startProcess of the WorkflowService has been adjusted to use this permission. modifyAuditTrail ExecutionPermission was replaced by the new startProcesses permission:

@ExecutionPermission(id=ExecutionPermission.Id.startProcesses,
      scope=ExecutionPermission.Scope.processDefinition,
      defaults={ExecutionPermission.Default.ALL})
ProcessInstance startProcess(String id, Map<String, ?> data, boolean synchronously)
      throws ObjectNotFoundException;

New WorkflowService startProcess method is introduced with start options

A new startProcess option is introduced for the WorkflowService to use start options when starting a process:

@ExecutionPermission(id=ExecutionPermission.Id.startProcesses,
      scope=ExecutionPermission.Scope.processDefinition,
      defaults={ExecutionPermission.Default.ALL})
ProcessInstance startProcess(String id, StartOptions options);

StartOptions is a container class for options that control how a process instance is started. Additionally to data and a boolean value for synchronously, a Benchmark reference unique ID can be determined.

New WorkflowService performAdHocTransitions method is introduced with changed parameters

Method performAdHocTransition of the WorkflowService is introduced with changed parameters and return value:

TransitionReport performAdHocTransition(TransitionTarget target, boolean complete)

The old implementation is now marked as deprecated, please see section Deprecated API.

New global permissions

New global permissions readRuntimeArtifact and deployRuntimeArtifact have been introduced to allow to read and deploy runtime artifacts.

New methods introduced for RuntimePermissions

The following methods are introduced for RuntimePermissions:

Method Return Value Parameter Description
getDeniedGrants Set<ModelParticipantInfo> String permissionId Retrieves the currently set of denied grants for a specified permission.
setDeniedGrants void String permissionId, Set<ModelParticipantInfo> grants Sets a deny grant to a set of participants for a specified permission.

New methods introduced for ActivityInstance and ProcessInstance

The following method is introduced for class ActivityInstance:

Method Return Value Parameter Description
getBenchmarkResult BenchmarkResult - Returns the current Benchmark value of the activity instance.

The following methods are introduced for class ProcessInstance:

Method Return Value Parameter Description
getBenchmarkResult BenchmarkResult - Returns the current Benchmark value.
getBenchmark long - Retrieves the OID of the Benchmark.

API introduced for managing Runtime Artifacts

The following classes have been introduced for managing runtime artifacts:

The following service methods have been introduced for managing runtime artifacts:

Please refer to chapter Managing Runtime Artifacts in the Programming Guide for details on managing runtime artifacts.

Query attributes for ActivityInstanceQuery and ProcessInstanceQuery

New query attributes BENCHMARK_OID and BENCHMARK_VALUE have been added to ActivityInstanceQuery and ProcessInstanceQuery.

SPI introduced for handling Artifacts

A new interface IArtifactHandler is introduced to handle artifacts.

Refer to chapter Implementing a Custom Artifact Type Handler in the Programming Guide for details on how to implement the SPI.

New Service methods introduced for creating and receiving Link Types

The following method is introduced for the AdministrationService to create a new type of link between process instances:

Method Return Value Parameter Description
createProcessInstanceLinkType ProcessInstanceLinkType String id, String description Creates a new type of link between process instances.

To query for link types, the following methods are introduced for the QueryService:

Method Return Value Parameter Description
getProcessInstanceLinkType ProcessInstanceLinkType String id Gets a specific process instance link type.
getAllProcessInstanceLinkTypes List<ProcessInstanceLinkType> - Gets all process instance link types defined.

Deprecated Functionality

The XML Data type integration is deprecated and will not be provided in the Eclipse modeler in future releases. You can use the External Reference structured data type instead, which is equivalent to the XML Data type, with the difference that it supports XSD schema exclusively (no DTD specification). Please refer to section Using External XSD Types of chapter Defining Structured Types for details.

Upgrading from a Previous Release

This section covers upgrading necessary for upgrading from releases earlier than 3.1.0.

For upgrading issues introduced with earlier releases, please refer to chapter Upgrading to Later Versions. There you find all upgrading steps necessary for your specific version.

Runtime upgrading

A runtime upgrade will be necessary to operate against audit trails created with earlier versions in order to account for the schema changes, which have been performed in this release. Please refer to section Runtime Upgrades of chapter Upgrading to Later Versions for details on how to upgrade an audit trail to a later version.

Schema changes

The following schema changes have been performed in this release:

For details on our Stardust audit trail database tables, please refer to chapter The Repository Model.

A runtime upgrade against audit trails created with earlier versions adds the new predefined process instance link type RELATED to the LINK_TYPE in the audit trail.

Note that this runtime upgrade job is optional and only required for usage of new link type RELATED.

Using Audit Trail Databases created with Versions earlier than 3.1 for Deployments in RAD

If you use an audit trail database in RAD that has been created with Stardust version earlier than 3.1, you have to deselect and select the database from the server configuration page. Republishing the server updates the Tomcat server.xml file with the new resource definition entry for embedded database usage.

Breaking Changes

The following breaking changes have been introduced with version 9.0.0:

Dropped Platforms and Platform Versions

The support for the following platforms or platform versions has been dropped with this release:

Newly supported Platforms

The following platform versions are supported since this release:

Known Issues and Restrictions with this Release

For general known issues and restrictions, please refer to the Troubleshooting section in the online documentation.

Known Issues

Firefox: Parameter selection is not updated on parameter list in Web modeler

If you add application parameters in the Web modeler using a Firefox browser, it might happen that the parameter list is not updated. Please clear your browser cache in that case. Note that the whole cache should be deleted from beginning of time.

Running into Timeouts when using the Benchmark Daemon

If you run into timeouts when you are using the Benchmark daemon, this might happen due to low batch size values. In that case increase the timeout value of the daemon queue via the property benchmark.daemon.BatchSize in your server-side carnot.properties file.

Additionally make sure that the default transaction timeout for your Daemon queue is at least equal to the value of property benchmark.daemon.Periodicity.

Please find details on properties benchmark.daemon.Periodicity and benchmark.daemon.BatchSize in section Daemon of chapter Server Side Properties.

Partially loaded or improperly formatted pages

If you experience partially loaded or improperly formatted pages, clear your Browser cache.

MSSQL - Issues occur when using MSSQL XA driver with disabled usage of prepared statements

Issues occur when you use an MSSQL XA driver and you do not have enabled the usage of prepared statements. Use prepared statements in combination with a native MSSQL XA driver to avoid these issues.

Cross Modeling: Renaming an imported Structured Data from a referenced Model causes Issues

Renaming an imported structured data from a referenced model in a cross-model scenario might lead to inconsistent behavior.

M2Eclipse - Missing HttpServlet class error occurs after creating a new Maven project based on archetypes

After creating a new project based on archetypes, a missing HttpServlet class error is displayed in the Problems view due to an issue with the m2e-wtp Eclipse plugin. The plugin enables the JavaServer Faces project facet, because it identifies JSF dependencies, and thus also applies additional files to the project. To avoid this issue, deselect the JSF Configurator option in the Maven preferences as described in section Deselecting the JSF Configurator option to avoid Missing HttpServlet class error of chapter Creating a Stardust Runtime Environment with Apache Maven.

JBoss 7.1 - javax.ws.rs.NotFoundException is thrown on server start-up

In case you get a java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax.ws.rs.NotFoundException during server start-up with JBoss 7.1, make sure to upgrade the shipped RESTEasy stack to version 3.x. Upgrading to the new RESTEasy stack version prevents that the Stardust jax-rs 2.0 is overwritten by the JBoss 1.0 jax-rs API during deployment, which otherwise happens due to issue https://issues.jboss.org/browse/WFLY-1304.

Exception occurs during a JBoss Deployment with MySQL version 5.6

The MySQL 5.6 installation comes with the MySql Connector/J in version 5.1.34. If you deploy this JAR into JBoss as a module and include it in the standalone.xml file, you are facing a DuplicateServiceException.

This is a known issue for JBoss versions earlier than 8 (Module for MySQL JDBC driver with version 5.1.30+ needs <driver-class> in standalone.xml). As a workaround you can define a specific driver-class in the standalone.xml in the driver section as follows:

   <driver name="mysql" module="com.mysql">
      <driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class>
      <xa-datasource-class>com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlXADataSource</xa-datasource-class>
   </driver>
   

For details please refer to section Restrictions for a Deployment with MySQL Version 5.6 in the JBoss chapter of the Deployment Guide.

No Exception is thrown by modifyUser method when executed in mixed mode

If the modifyUser API is invoked in mixed mode (external and internal Authentication) to change the password and user information of an existing user, no Exception is thrown. The user information remains unchanged even though a successful response is provided.

ActiveMQ message server does not work with Java 8

Note that the ActiveMQ message server currently does not work with Java 8.

Portal - Exception occurs when expanding a repository folder with a large number of child nodes in a JBoss environment

If you expand a repository folder having a number of child nodes that exceeds a maximum number of about 500 and you are using a JBoss server, the following Exception might occur:

JBWEB000065: HTTP Status 500 - JBWEB002004: More than the maximum number of request parameters (GET plus POST) for a single request (512) 
   were detected. Any parameters beyond this limit have been ignored. To change this limit, set the maxParameterCount attribute 
   on the Connector.

To resolve this issue, add the following property to your JBoss configuration:

<system-properties>
   <property name="org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Parameters.MAX_COUNT" value="1000"/> 
</system-properties>

Issues with modern skin

The modern skin has the following issues in Mozilla FireFox or Google Chrome:

HTML5 color picker is not supported in Internet Explorer for Benchmark categories

Note that the HTML5 color picker is not supported in the Internet Explorer for Benchmark categories. The color can be set for the category by entering the hexadecimal code for that color in the Internet Explorer.

SSO IAF IdP project - synchronization fails in case no unscoped organization exists in model

Currently an unscoped organization is required in the model for the participant hierarchy to be synchronized to the IAF Infinity IdP correctly. Please refer to chapter Setting up WebSSO Authentication with the Stardust SSO SAML2 Artifact for details.

Logging for Portal WAR deployment on WebLogic misses information

If you perform a standard Stardust portal WAR deployment on WebLogic, the produced log might miss some details like bootstrapping information from the Spring Framework or route tracing from the Camel Context.

To provide a proper logging, copy the slf4j-api-1.5.11.jar and slf4j-log4j12-1.5.11.jar libraries to the lib folder of your WebLogic domain.

Known Restrictions

Restriction for spawning into multiple activities joined by an inclusive OR

Due to the synchronous operation of a relocation, spawning into multiple activities, e.g. as resulted from an AND split, might not work as expected in the following scenario:

Please refer to chapter Relocating Activities in the Programming Guide for details.

Restrictions in the Business Process Modeler

For a list of all known restrictions in the Business Process Modeler, please refer to section Restrictions in Modeler Functionality of chapter Compatibility and Analogy of Models.

Testing a Rule Set implementation

Note that you need a lifecycle management environment to be able to run and test a Rule Task implementing a Rule Set. Please contact our Sales Support Team for details.

Technical Rules editor code restriction

For the time being, you need to append _field to each variable in the code editor of a technical rule in the Rules Management perspective. Refer to chapter Defining Technical Rules for details.

UI Mashup application restrictions

UI Mashup applications have the following restrictions:

Limitations with JBoss 7.1

The following modifications need to be applied in the JBoss 7.1 server:

Due to an issue, the JBoss default JSF implementation cannot be changed as parameter WAR_BUNDLES_JSF_IMPL is not working in JBoss 7.1.1. (WAR file using WAR_BUNDLES_JSF_IMPL embedded in an EAR file fails deployment). This is caused by the issue: JSF Version retrieved from deployment unit instead of top level deployment unit.

As a workaround, in com/sun/jsf-impl/main module in jsf-impl-2.1.7-jbossorg-2.jar/META-INF: the .tld files have to be renamed to e.g. *-tmp.tld.

Limitations with JBoss 7.1 for EJB3 Deployment

While deploying JBoss 7.1 for EJB 3, the following exception may occur: org.jboss.msc.service.ServiceNotFoundException: Service service jboss.ejb.default-resource-adapter-name-service not found

For a successful deployment, add the following under <subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:Domain:ejb3:1.4"> in the standalone.xml file.

   <mdb>
      <resource-adapter-ref resource-adapter-name="hornetq-ra"/>
      <bean-instance-pool-ref pool-name="mdb-strict-max-pool"/>
   </mdb>
   

Limitation with refresh of Worklist view

Worklist will not refresh itself automatically when the View is activated by tab switch or by clicking on it. It will refresh only when any activity was previously activated from the Worklist View. Note that this is not related to auto-refresh settings of worklist configuration. The auto-refresh settings would still refresh at specified time interval.

Limitation with Audit Trail Import/Export functionality

When audit trail import / export functionality is configured to be active, for some runtime platforms, interactions involving asynchronous engine operations may be delayed.

Upgrading from a Previous Release

A runtime upgrade is not required for this release. For other upgrading issues introduced with earlier releases, please refer to chapter Upgrading to Later Versions. You will find all upgrading steps necessary for your specific version.

Previous Releases