Designer not good enough for production. Alternatives?

[pouria]

Hi,

The Activiti designer is clearly not good enough for use in production in its current state.

If you are using activiti for real world production, are you using the activiti designer? If not what alternative are you using?

[trademak]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback, but could you please be a bit more detailed about such a bold statement.
Please explain the experiences you had with the Designer, so it's possible to improve the Designer.

Best regards,

[pouria]

Sure,

The major issue that puts us off from using activiti altogether:

Modifying and saving an *.activiti file in the designer, will overwrite the corresponding .bpmn20.xml file, so any modifications done to the .bpmn20.xml file done by hand (e.g. adding a "activiti:initiator" attribute to a start event, which currently can not be done through the designer),  will be lost.

This is a major setback for us because throughout our project we will have to change our processes quite often (requirements change), also our processes tend to become very sizable, so we can't afford to have all of our xml modifications (which probably coudn't be done using the designer) get overwritten and lost.

There are also some minor nuisances which we can overlook for now:

- Installable only on eclipse SDK (eclipse classic), didn't work on STS or eclipse for java ee (dependency clashes).
- Supported nodes in the palette are not complete. (This could become a major issue halfway through the project.)

I tried to give honest opinions here, tell me whether you also experience the same issues.
Also do you know of any workarounds/tips for these issues?

[trademak]

Hi,

You can disable the automatic save / overwrite of the corresponding .bpmn20.xml file in the Eclipse preferences - Activiti - Save menu. Of course this still means that changes in the XML are not picked up in the Activiti diagram. There is workaround for this by deleting the .activiti file and reopening the .bpmn20.xml file. Then the .activiti diagram will get generated again based on the .bpmn20.xml. But adding an activiti:initiator is not synced to the diagram as this is not supported yet. But that's really easy to add, so please create a JIRA for this.

You say the Designer doesn't support the full range of elements supported by the Activiti Engine.
If you run into elements which are not supported yet (which you need in your project), please create a JIRA.

Right, the Designer doesn't run on STS or Eclipse Java EE. This is still a problem we need to solve and any help is appreciated.

Best regards,