For external tasks I have a hacky workaround. I get the lock time by requesting the "lockExpirationTime" and than substract the lock time from the external task client. A lock time or create time without workaround would be awesome.

That really is a hack, that results in wrong information in many cases. It only works if the task client locks it right after creation and only until that client finishes processing it.

Sure to get the create time it doesn't work like that. However if you only want to get the lock time for the current task in your external task client code it works quite well, because the "lockExpirationTime" is calculated when the "fetchAndLock" happens. fetchAndLockTime = lockExpirationTime - externalTaskLockDuration

Hi simon.hanna,

Thank you for the feature request. Adding a created_at column for runtime Process Instances/Executions and External Tasks would lead to duplicating data since, as you say, it's already present in the historic tables.

Can you provide more information on the use-case, and what is the gain of adding this information in the runtime table, or how much is the current overhead when querying the historic data?

Best,
Nikola

For process instances our main use case is to retrieve a list of active process instances sorted by creation time.
For this we could theoretically use the history, but the history space is much larger and there is no index on start_time there.
Further the history is not guaranteed to be present (if people choose to omit it from being created in the first case)
We can work around it, but we do have certain process definitions where we intentionally do not create history.

Everything is more complicated with external tasks.

"act_hi_ext_task_log_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id_)
"act_hi_ext_task_log_proc_def_key" btree (proc_def_key_)
"act_hi_ext_task_log_procdef" btree (proc_def_id_)
"act_hi_ext_task_log_procinst" btree (proc_inst_id_)
"act_hi_ext_task_log_rm_time" btree (removal_time_)
"act_hi_ext_task_log_root_pi" btree (root_proc_inst_id_)
"act_hi_ext_task_log_tenant_id" btree (tenant_id_)
"act_idx_hi_exttasklog_errordet" btree (error_details_id_)

We can't efficiently retrieve a single task, becuase there is no index on the task id.
We can't get a list of active tasks with creation date because they are stored in different log entries. We would have to get all start and end events and manually find out if a task has a start log entry but no end log entry.

Having the timestamps on the active instances (the ones we need to operate on) would make life much easier for us (let us actually implement features...)

Hi simon.hanna,

Thank you for the nice explanation. I understand the use-case and requirement, so I will forward it for decision making.

Best,
Nikola

Hello simon.hanna,

We have discussed this feature request in our product management and agree that this would be a nice addition to the runtime APIs. Would you be interested to make a contribution?

Best regards,
Thorben

This ticket was migrated to github: https://github.com/camunda/camunda-bpm-platform/issues/2260. Please use this link for any future references and continue any discussion there.