Don’t need to talk about the deploy itself, since it works perfectly in other situations.
Activiti throws an exception if the bpmn contains expressions with an “&” (that is sent as &):
2018-12-12 09:45:10,647 ERROR BpmnXMLConverter [qtp1824379333-91 ] Error processing BPMN document
javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamException: ParseError at [row,col]:[30,78]
Message: The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference.
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLStreamReaderImpl.next(XMLStreamReaderImpl.java:604)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.impl.XMLStreamReaderImpl.getElementText(XMLStreamReaderImpl.java:865)
at org.activiti.bpmn.converter.child.ConditionExpressionParser.parseChildElement(ConditionExpressionParser.java:34)
at org.activiti.bpmn.converter.util.BpmnXMLUtil.parseChildElements(BpmnXMLUtil.java:126)
at org.activiti.bpmn.converter.BaseBpmnXMLConverter.parseChildElements(BaseBpmnXMLConverter.java:249)
at org.activiti.bpmn.converter.BaseBpmnXMLConverter.parseChildElements(BaseBpmnXMLConverter.java:240)
at org.activiti.bpmn.converter.SequenceFlowXMLConverter.convertXMLToElement(SequenceFlowXMLConverter.java:47)
at org.activiti.bpmn.converter.BaseBpmnXMLConverter.convertToBpmnModel(BaseBpmnXMLConverter.java:84)
at org.activiti.bpmn.converter.BpmnXMLConverter.convertToBpmnModel(BpmnXMLConverter.java:430)
<bpmn2:sequenceFlow id="SequenceFlow_0n3qmsm" sourceRef="ExclusiveGateway_1pxlfg4" targetRef="Task_1nf8qhh">
<bpmn2:conditionExpression xsi:type="bpmn2:tFormalExpression">${a > 2 && a < 3}</bpmn2:conditionExpression>
</bpmn2:sequenceFlow>
If it doesn’t contain an & or if the & is inside a CDATA it wont throw an exception, parsing the bpmn deployed as it should.