Step-by-Step Guide to Deploying and Using Flowable Workflow Engine with Spring Boot

The author announces the completion of a Spring Cloud Alibaba video series and introduces Flowable, a powerful open‑source BPMN workflow engine, as a practical tool for building approval processes.

1. Deploy flowable‑ui

Download https://github.com/flowable/flowable-engine/releases/download/flowable-6.6.0/flowable-6.6.0.zip , extract flowable-6.6.0\wars\flowable-ui.war , and deploy it to Tomcat. Access the UI at http://localhost:8080/flowable-ui with the default credentials admin/test . After logging in, use the APP.MODELER to create a process and optionally edit apache-tomcat-9.0.37\webapps\flowable-ui\WEB-INF\classes\flowable-default.properties to point to a local MySQL database.

2. Draw the process diagram

In the modeler, add basic BPMN elements such as events, sequence flows, gateways, and user tasks. The article explains each element and shows a sample leave‑approval flow where a student submits a request, a teacher reviews it, and a principal gives final approval.

3. Backend project setup

The backend is built with JDK 8 and Spring Boot 2.3.0.RELEASE. Add the following dependencies to pom.xml :

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.flowable</groupId>
    <artifactId>flowable-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
    <version>6.6.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
    <version>5.1.45</version>
</dependency>

Configure the datasource in application.yml to connect to the Flowable database.

4. Database tables

Flowable creates tables prefixed with ACT_ . The article lists the purpose of each prefix (RE – repository, RU – runtime, HI – history, GE – generic) and enumerates key tables such as act_ru_task , act_hi_procinst , act_id_user , etc.

5. Engine API and services

The main services are RepositoryService, RuntimeService, IdentityService, FormService, HistoryService, ManagementService, and DynamicBpmnService. Typical usage includes deploying a BPMN zip, starting a process instance, claiming and completing tasks, and querying historic data.

Code example

import lombok.extern.slf4j.Slf4j;
import org.flowable.engine.HistoryService;
import org.flowable.engine.RepositoryService;
import org.flowable.engine.RuntimeService;
import org.flowable.engine.history.HistoricProcessInstance;
import org.flowable.engine.repository.Deployment;
import org.flowable.engine.repository.ProcessDefinition;
import org.flowable.engine.runtime.Execution;
import org.flowable.engine.runtime.ProcessInstance;
import org.flowable.idm.api.Group;
import org.flowable.idm.api.User;
import org.flowable.task.api.Task;
import org.flowable.task.api.history.HistoricTaskInstance;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.zip.ZipInputStream;

@Slf4j
public class TestFlowable {
    @Autowired private RepositoryService repositoryService;
    @Autowired private RuntimeService runtimeService;
    @Autowired private HistoryService historyService;
    @Autowired private org.flowable.engine.TaskService taskService;
    @Autowired private org.flowable.engine.IdentityService identityService;

    public void createDeploymentZip() {
        try {
            File zipTemp = new File("f:/leave_approval.bpmn20.zip");
            ZipInputStream zipInputStream = new ZipInputStream(new FileInputStream(zipTemp));
            Deployment deployment = repositoryService.createDeployment()
                .addZipInputStream(zipInputStream)
                .deploy();
            log.info("部署成功:{}", deployment.getId());
        } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        // query definitions, start process, claim/complete tasks, query history, etc.
    }
}

6. References

Flowable documentation (Chinese translation): https://github.com/qiudaoke/flowable-userguide

Official Flowable‑6.6.0 demo

Additional blog post: https://www.cnblogs.com/yangjiming/p/10938515.html

The author concludes with a call for likes, shares, and follows, and provides links to PDF collections of his other Spring Cloud, Spring Boot, and MyBatis tutorials.