Environment Variables

Environment Variables

Environment variables offer a way to make configuration data available at the start of a BPMN process execution. They are the same for all running process instances. They can be defined by adding a member variable with the Spring-Framework @Value annotation to any Spring managed bean. For the DSF, the most prominent are classes annotated with @Configuration. The value of the annotation uses the ${..} notation and follows the form ${some.property:defaultValue}, where each dot in the property name corresponds to an underscore in the equivalent environment variable. Environment variables are always written upper-case. The property some.property therefore corresponds to the environment variable SOME_PROPERTY.

The DSF provides a feature to automatically generate documentation of environment variables during the Maven build process. The @ProcessDocumentation annotation can be used to automatically generate Markdown documentation for all fields with this annotation. This requires adding dsf-tools-documentation-generator as a maven plugin. There is an example pom.xml for the tutorial-process submodule located on GitHub which uses the maven plugin. The <workingPackage> field has to point to the package where documentation is desired.