A closer look at Bonita 2021.2: BDM deployment improvements

Let's continue diving into some of the new features of Bonita 2021.2 as it is available for your download. Whether you are using Bonita Community or Bonita Enterprise, you will find in this series of posts some great new functionalities and improvements.

After a series of articles about Bonita Studio (Project overview, project composition, organization and expression editors, how to develop extensions with Maven archetypes), we have started diving deeper into Bonita Runtime, with the new Bonita user interfaces and the support of OpenID Connect as SSO.

This week I will tell you more about what has been improved in the business data model (BDM).

Why?

As administrators are handling with changes and updates of Business data models regularly, it was important to improve deployment and update management, and make it easier for them to handle errors.

The deployment and update process has been improved to avoid manual actions, and some guidance has been added both in Bonita Administrator (and Super Administrator) applications and logs.

What?

• The robustness of concurrent BDM install or resume has been improved.

Whatever happens, you will not be blocked while performing updates on a BDM and logs have been improved to provide more context information.

• The model validation is now at installation instead of resuming BPM services.

As the model is validated at installation and warning you in case of error, there is no risk of resuming BPM services with an invalid BDM, which would imply a manual roll back. You can detect errors at the earliest in the update process.

• Automatic roll back in case of installation failure

In case you want to install a new BDM over an existing one and this operation fails, all BDM schema changes will be rolled back.

An alert will inform you that Bonita Runtime reverts to the last BDM version, and this information is available in the logs as well. You don’t need to deploy the BDM again.

These improvements fix a few issues from prior versions. For more details, please refer to the release notes.

Want to know more about BDM usage?

You can refer to the documentation page to learn more about how a BDM is deployed.

And of course stay tuned, as next week we’ll see together how to manage migration of profiles from Bonita Portal to the new Bonita applications.