Changing the style of tasks via the Designer

[florianp]

Hi,

is there a possibility to change the style and layout of tasks using the Designer?
For example: Changing the font-size of certain labels or modifying the color of a task.

I think this would be pretty useful in order to customize the generated diagrams and use them for presentational purposes.
Right now I'm modifying the *.activiti files using the Eclipse built-in XML editor to change font-sizes, but it would be way more convenient to have those possibilities in the Designer.

I also noticed that after I changed the font-size for all existing tasks to 10, newly inserted tasks are again created with a font size of 8, also adding another fonts element in the fonts definition in the XML.
Is there any way to modify those default values for new tasks? Or would I have to extend the palette with the same objects that are in the standard palette, just with different default styles?

Regards
Florian

[trademak]

Hi,

We use the Eclipse Graphiti framework for this. So the behavior of storing font information in the .activiti file is default Graphiti behavior.
What we could do is make the color and font size editable in a preferences page.
Is this something you would be willing to contribute?

Best regards,

[florianp]

Hi,

I would be interested to contribute this to the Designer.
I don't have any experience with developing Eclipse plugins, though. Could you please provide me with some more information and explain how to get started with this task?
And how much effort would that be, what do you think?

Best regards
Florian

[trademak]

Hi,

Cool. If you don't have any experience with developing Eclipse plugins this will not be an easy task.
A rough guess would be that you need around 40 - 60 hours to implement this including all the learning steps.
If you are able to invest this amount of time I would suggest looking at vogella.de for an introduction into Eclipse plugins.
Then you could take a thorough look at the Activiti Designer code. If you need pointers then let me know.
The org.activiti.designer.eclipse project contains a number of Preferences pages that you can take a look at.

Best regards,