For a project we had to develop a spring boot webservice including the camunda rest engine to controll the process.
When including and starting the camunda process by the autowired capablity we had the problem the just a empty process was launched, not using our deployed process definition.
Solution:
To tackle this problem we used spring boots EventLister annoation to know when the application had fully deployed the process and then starting it.
@EventListener
public void processPostDeploy(PostDeployEvent event) {
instance = runtimeService.startProcessInstanceByKey("Process");
//..
}