Background Jobs

Emakin performs most of the heavy operations in the background to achieve scalable and high performance outputs. These background operations are executed by emakin service agent without any user interaction.

When a new process is started by user, workflow state is recorded in the database without any further processing, and creates a couple of background jobs. Service agents pull the jobs from the queue and try to process in background. If an error occurs while processing the job, transaction state is rollbacked and error state is reported to the system administrators. When administrator resolves the issue, job is re-queued in the system, from the job manager to the process again. Some of the errors are automatically recovered by the system and queued again with time delay.

Service agents use multiple threads, and can also be deployed to any number of hardware instances to perform parallel execution. Jobs are executed in order of priority, and a single service agent can complete 600 jobs per minute for the basic workflow operations. This number is highly dependent on the job definition and hardware specifications.

Job Details

Each job has following properties:

Type
Type of a job. 

Created At
Date and time when a job is created.

Delete After
Date and time after which the job will be deleted.

Started At
Start date and time of a job.

Completed At
Completion date and time of a job.

Duration
Duration of execution if a job is completed, or duration of wait time in a queue.

Score
Calculated priority score. This value is calculated from a job type priority and a workflow instance priority.

State
State of a job. Can be one of following values; Waiting, Processing, Error, Completed, Aborted.

State Transition

Every job is created in the "Waiting" state.

When a service agent pulls the job from the queue, agent locks the job and changes state to the "Processing".

If the job is successfully completed, the state changes to "Completed".

If the job generates an error, state changes to "Error", and system administrator is notified. Some of the job errors are automatically handled. For example, e-mail sending job errors are ignored and re-scheduled, and state changes to "Waiting" to try again later. If maximum try count limit is exceeded, the state is changed to the "Error" or "Aborted" by the configuration settings.

For "Aborted" and "Completed" states, job is automatically deleted from the system if "Delete After" date passed. 

Job Log

Each job contains a log about detailed information of what is performed in the background. Each log line has an in log level like Debug, Information, Warning, Error.

Job Types

Workflow Jobs

Scheduled Task

Time based generic job. This job usually creates another jobs if any action required.

Task Evaluation

Created when the initiate type workflow task is scheduled to start periodically. Created by the Scheduled Task per task definition. You can find more details in the Task Evaluation section. 

Work Item Evaluation

Created when the normal type workflow task is scheduled to check periodically. Created by the Scheduled Task per work item instance. You can find more details in the Task Evaluation section.

Work Item Processing

Created when a user or a system completes a work item. This job advances to the next step in the workflow, and executes the scripts in the workflow, calculates the role scripts which should be assigned to the task.

Deadlined Work Item

Created when a work item's deadline occurs. This job is similar to the "Work Item Processing" job, but created when the deadline date is missed.

Work Item Reminder

Created when a task reminder needs to be sent.

Xml Database Jobs

Form Data Xml Database Replication

Created when the workflow data needs to be replicated on an xml database. This job is usually created when a workflow data is modified.

Instance Xml Database Replication

Created when a workflow history is changed and needs to be replicated on an xml database.

Xml Database Removal

Created when a workflow data is removed. This job is usually created when a process version is deleted from the system.

Full Text Indexing Jobs

Work Item Full Text Indexing

Created when a workflow data is modified and updates the full text catalog.

Document Full Text Indexing

Created when a document content is modified and updates the full text catalog.

Full Text Removal

Created when a previously added document is removed from the full text catalog.

Domain Jobs

E-Mail Message Send

Created when an email message is sent. Email content may be automatically generated from the workflow templates or scripting environment.

Domain Upgrade

Created periodically to upgrade installed processes from the market store.

Domain Deletion

Created when a domain is expired and no longer active.

Default Job Configuration

Emakin uses following default configuration to manage the job queue.