Warning: It is not recommended to use a intermediate catch timer event with a time cycle

Camunda 7 Topics Discussion & Questions
1

Hi, I have created a process with an Event Based Gateway, and one of the outbound flows from the Gateway is a timer. This timer needs to trigger everyday at 6PM, so I have set a Cycle Timer with Timer Definition as “0 0 18 * * ?”.

When I run the Spring Boot project with this process, I got the following warning during the deployment:

"ENGINE-09004 Warnings during parsing:

  • It is not recommended to use a intermediate catch timer event with a time cycle.“”

Why this is not recommended, and what is the alternative to not using a time cycle in this case?

Thanks!

Fernando

2

Hello @ftaniguti ,

instead of the cycle definition, you could use a date definition using the expression language:

${dateTime().withTime(18,0,0,0).toDate()}

You find more information about this here:

https://docs.camunda.org/manual/latest/user-guide/process-engine/expression-language/#internal-context-functions

Hope this helps

Jonathan

3

Is the reason for the warning just to cover a misleading interpretation that a “cycle” will really only happen a single time because the process proceeds downstream of the intermediate gateway after execution?

The reason I ask is because I’m struggling to come up with an/clean way to represent a timer catch on “the next Xday” using the Joda-Time library but the cycle definition is working as intended.

For example, if I want the time to trigger on the next Wednesday; relative to the point in time the token arrived at the gateway…the time cycle definition works as expected.

4

Hello @skyag ,

as long as it works, you could ignore the warning I guess. As I see it, there will be no side Effects to this. Anyway, this is an interesting exercise to do :stuck_out_tongue: Find an expression that triggers on the next Wednesday…

Jonathan

5