OIC: How to Force Dehydration in Processes

This article describes a trick how you can force a Structured Process instance in OIC to dehydrate.

OIC Process uses the database to store its state, which is called dehydration. In contrast, restoring that state from the database is called hydration. Dehydration automatically happens at points where the process may have to wait for a 'longer' period of time, for example at a Receive or User activity, or a Timer Catch event. Dehydration is also the point where the transaction of the process instance ends (and a new one starts).

Sometimes you may want to force dehydration. For example, you may have a Structured Process for which the operation to start it should synchronously return some value, while the process performs several other steps before it reaches the first dehydration point, and the transaction ends. The out-of-the-box behavior will be that the start operation will not return a response before it has ended the transaction, which may imply that the consumer has to wait for a relative long time

In the following process model some business data is stored synchronously, and then some other process is started synchronously, making that the transaction does not end before it has reached the End event:

A simple way to make it return the response sooner, is to include a Timer Catch event of 2 seconds (or longer, but 2 suffices). This will make the process engine force to dehydrate the state of the instance:

For those who know the (on-premise) Oracle BPM Suite: exactly the same trick as we used there 😉