Hi guys,
just wanted to let you know that I’m currently working on an extension to 7.5s migration mechanism.
What Camunda provided with 7.5 release is a very good idea! Instead of having to reinvent the wheel over and over again… ah, well, I guess you get the point 
So, why an extension then? you might ask.The answer is simple:
- The migration plans you can create are deployment-specific. It’s not out-of-the-box possible to create a migration plan on a dev machine, test it in a QA environment and then run it on production.
- Sometimes its just not enough to simply migrate a variable along. You have to rename it, change its value, its type or delete/create it. Just think of some composite key stored in one variable that has to be split up into two.
And that’s exactly what the extension addresses.
I’d be glad if I could get some feedback from you 
Especially if you plan to do some migrations in the near future and are looking for a way to do that, then please have a look at it.
If you are interested in using the extension, then I’m interested in supporting you and speed up the extension’s development.
You will find it there → GitHub - camunda-community-hub/camunda-7-migration: Fluent Java API for Camunda Platform 7 process instance migration
Cheers!
2 Likes
Hi Malte,
It is great that you like migration and want to improve it. The improvements you mention are very similar to what we in the core team consider good improvements, confer our migration backlog and in particular issues CAM-5316 and CAM-5317.
In that sense, I would rather like such improvements to become part of the core codebase instead of a community extension.
Cheers,
Thorben
Hi Torben,
thanks for your replay and pointing to these issues.
They don’t seem to have a high priority. What’s the timeframe for them?
Honestly, I think an extension is a good starting point to gather real-life use cases. I won’t go mad if you add similar features to the core in 3 - 4 releases 
Cheers,
Malte
Hi Malte,
Our plans for improving migration will be based on the feedback we receive and I think we still need to gather that feedback. Right now, we do not have a concrete plan for when we are building new features and which that will be. For a specific JIRA ticket, you can tell by the “Fix Version” field. My point in my previous post was rather that we are thinking in the same direction
I agree that an extension is good to get going fast and get feedback. In contrast, I think that certain features are easier to build within Camunda BPM than on top of it (e.g. transforming variables during migration; Cockpit integration) and that a core feature reaches more people. So if you are going to tackle these topics, you can also consider contributing directly to the Camunda core when the API design is not risky and the implementation actually easier.
Cheers,
Thorben
Hi Thorben,
You are right with what you say. Plus: I would definitely like to be a core contributer 
As for now I’d like to go with the extension approach until I have more clarity about the use cases.
But I could move closer to the core in terms of design, conventions etc. so we could more easily move this into it at a later point.
That way you will get a more mature feature for the core. What do you think?
Sure, sounds good. Keep us updated about your progress
There hasn’t been an update for some time, but I wasn’t lazy
On February 13th we will have a Camunda User Group meetup in Hamburg. And guess what, process instance migration and camunda-bpm-migration will be the topic.
http://meetu.ps/e/Cm768/jq7jz/f
See you there! (all of you! ;))
Hi Malte,
Thorben told me that you made some progress on your extension and you would like to add it as an Camunda community extension. As Thorben is already quite busy supervising another community project, I would like to assist you with all the help needed to setup the the extension properly. So feel to approach me any time you have an organizational question
The next step would be to transfer your project to the Camunda organization. There are two ways to achieve that:
- I can create the repository in the Camunda organization and give you push rights. This would lose the two issues in your current repository and would not create redirects from the current repository URL to the new URL.
- To make a proper transfer including issues and redirects, the transferring user must have admin rights in the Camunda organization. Going down this route, you could transfer the repository to my personal user first (named JoHeinem) and I would then transfer it to the Camunda organization. Some details on repository transfer can be found here: https://help.github.com/articles/transferring-a-repository-owned-by-your-personal-account/
(answer is based on this post from Thorben)
Best,
Johannes
2 Likes
Hi Johannes,
that’s great news!
The second way looks best, of course, so let’s do that. I will take care of it timely, but it might be tomorrow, though.
Thank you :),
Malte
@JoHeinem I just moved the repository to your account
Hi Malte,
Okay, great! I’ll take care of the rest later on and let you know as soon as I’m done.
Best,
Johannes
Hi @malteser,
The repository has now been transferred to the Camunda organization and can be found here:
In order to mark that a discussion is related to the migration extension, I created a dedicated forum category for it:
https://forum.camunda.io/c/community-extensions/migration-api
The next step will be setting up a Jenkins build on https://app.camunda.com/jenkins/view/cam-community/ , which enables us to release the extension on Camunda Nexus and Maven central. I’ll see that we get this done within the next weeks.
Best,
Johannes
2 Likes
As for now I’d like to go with the extension approach until I have more clarity about the use cases.