如何捕获在 Alfresco 的 Activiti 6 中发送电子邮件时发生的错误？

Question

I need to send emails, and I use a service task for it:

<serviceTask id="SendEmail_1" name="Sending a notification by email" activiti:type="mail">
  <documentation></documentation>
  <extensionElements>
    <activiti:field name="to">
      <activiti:expression><![CDATA[${to}]]></activiti:expression>
    </activiti:field>
    <activiti:field name="subject">
      <activiti:expression><![CDATA[${subject}]]></activiti:expression>
    </activiti:field>
    <activiti:field name="text">
      <activiti:expression><![CDATA[${body}]]></activiti:expression>
    </activiti:field>
    <activiti:field name="ignoreException">
      <activiti:string><![CDATA[true]]></activiti:string>
    </activiti:field>
    <activiti:field name="charset">
      <activiti:string><![CDATA[utf8]]></activiti:string>
    </activiti:field>
  </extensionElements>
</serviceTask>

I also need to catch the errors that occur when sending mail. In the user guide, I read that in order to get a description of the error, you need to read from the variables of the process the value of the variable " exceptionVariableName ". As you can see above, I added this to the service task, but so far I have not seen that it works. I tried to give him non-existent addresses of recipients, but there was no error. Does it even work? When does it work? Or is there another mechanism for getting error descriptions?

PS I use Activiti 6.0.0.

PSS I tried to add the block below in the " extensionElements " tag:

<activiti:field name="exceptionVariableName">
  <activiti:string><![CDATA[error]]></activiti:string>
</activiti:field>

And it also did not help me (for example, if the recipients are not correct).

PSSS I specified the wrong smtp server host (while creating the process configuration bean), and I got the error description (the Java code for receiving it is presented below), but it is uninformative.

public void logEmailSending(DelegateExecution execution) {
    Object error = execution.getVariable("error");
    if (error != null)
        logger.error("An error occurred while sending the email: " + error);
}

it almost solved my problem, but, as I wrote above, I would like to be more concrete by mistake, and it still does not catch the error in the recipients addresses

Answer 1

We hit the same wall in Activiti BPM 6.0.0 . We solved our problem with the following steps.

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1. Implementing a new service task eg SendEmailServiceTask which extends org.activiti.engine.impl.bpmn.behavior.MailActivityBehavior . This was necessary in order to override the method handleException which takes care of exception handling.

From the Activiti documentation 8.5.6. Email Task note that the mail task is not an official task of the BPMN 2.0 spec (and it does not have a dedicated icon as a consequence). Hence, in Activiti the mail task is implemented as a dedicated service task.

In our service task implementation we took care of:

• Catching the EmailException, SendFailedException due to errors on SMTP.
• Parsing informative data from exception and logging into application logs and user action journals.
• Setting our custom BPM process variables in order to control the further execution flow.

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2. Modifying the BPMN process definition, more precisely replacing the mail task activiti with our new service task from point 1.

In order to reproduce the same functionality of default mail task provided by Activiti we had to set class fields from , bcc , subject and text . The same values were set as on previously defined mail task.

And most important we had to set ignoreException to true in order to prevent BPM engine to throw ActivitiException due to exceptions on SMTP (invalid recipient, SMTP server domain, etc.) while sending email to the recipient.

Our business requirement was to either sucessfully send mail to all recipients in bcc field or fail. For this reason we didn't model our service task as multiinstance element.

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I am absolutely aware there exist other solutions for this particular problem. We managed to solve it as described above.