Timer on user task, start only after claiming by candidate

davedavedave

Im assigning a user task to a candidate group. After a user from the group claims the task, I want to start a timer, and if the user doesn't finish the task in time I want to unassign the user on the task and give it back to the candidate group, so another person can pick it up. What is the best way to achieve this?

I tried putting a boundary timer event on the user task, looping it back to the task, but that timer starts at the moment the task is created, so even if its not claimed (yet), it keeps recreating taks every time the timer expires. Is there a way for the timer to start only when a candidate claims the task? Or is there a better way I can approach this? 

afaust

There is no way to solve this just by modelling. Boundary timers always start on creation - no way around that.

What you could do though (Note: very hacky and probably considered unsupported !!) is to have your boundary timer use an extremely long time to fire (excessively long in fact), and implement a Java-based assignment task listener that "updates" the timer with the proper due date. The fact that "updates" is in quotation marks is due to the fact that APS / Activiti actually does not have an API to simply update the timer. You have to load, delete, and reinsert it after you changed the due date.