History

History captures what happens during process execution and stores it permanently. Unlike runtime data, history data stays in the database after process instances complete.

The process engine stores history in six entities:

  • Historic Process Instances — current and past process instances.

  • Historic Variable Instances — the latest value of each process or task variable.

  • Historic Activity Instances — single executions of activities (nodes in the process).

  • Historic Task Instances — current and past (completed and deleted) task instances.

  • Historic Identity Links — current and past identity links of tasks and process instances.

  • Historic Details — additional information about a historic process instance, activity instance, or task instance, such as variable changes.

Historic entities cover both ongoing and completed instances. To keep process execution fast, consider querying historic entities instead of runtime data where possible, for example, for reporting and monitoring. The available data depends on the history level.

History Levels

The history level defines which history entities the process engine stores:

Level

Stored entities

none

None.

instance

Historic process instances.

task

Historic process instances and task instances.

activity

Historic process instances, activity instances, and variable instances.

audit

Historic process instances, task instances, activity instances, variable instances, and identity links. This is the default level.

full

All entities stored by audit, plus historic details with every change of variable values. This level produces a lot of data.

To set the level for the whole process engine, use the flowable.history-level application property:

flowable.history-level=activity

To set the level for a specific process, use the History level process property in the Modeler.

To ignore the history levels of specific processes and always use the history level of the process engine, set the following application property:

flowable.process.enable-process-definition-history-level=false

For details, see Flowable documentation.