Intermediate timer event

[prad]

Hi Guys

I am new to Activiti and BPMN based workflows, but have used other workflow engine such as Tibcos's iProcess.

Currently using v5.3 of activiti, I was trying to quickly put up a demo workflow for my business. The workflow had something that can be implemented using a timer intermediate event. So I first started with the modeler eclipse plugin. Only later I realised that the modeler does not support it. I then tried to modify the xml and added the code block as mentioned in the user guide. But the designer it seems doesn't like anything hand written and it over wrote and removed my lines of code. I then ventured to download the modeler web based Signavio to do the same thing. At first I was quite happy that it supported the various notations. I could quickly create the demo workflow structure. Went to activiti-probe to deploy the process and I am getting all those xml validation errors. I saw a post in the forum that the web modeler currently does not validate against bpmn20 xsd. Fair enough. But my question remains the same as to how I can utilise timer intermediate event via the eclipse plugin. Am sure when the documentation says that you can use it, there should be a way of doing it. Can you guys let me know in real world how we are supposed to complete our workflow? Is there a work around for this situation? I really need to get it going and as such I am out of time. So any help or idea is a great welcome!

The timer event that I am concerned now, is a smaller manifestation of a bigger issue. So I need to know if we only deal with the constructs that the designer allows and sadly ignore other features that the documentation say we can do.

Cheers
Prad

[tiesebarrell]

prad,

the problem you ran into is that editing the BPMN file directly is fine by Designer, as long as it supports everything you're doing - in that case your changes will also be reflected in the diagram view (they have to be kept in sync by the tool for obvious reasons). The BPMN file is a generated file, so it will always be overwritten if you edit the diagram and only with constructs the diagram understands. A bug was fixed where not all of the timer event's attributes were copied and the fix will be in the next release of Designer.

For now, to not lose your changes, you will have to copy the BPMN file and then make changes so they're not overwritten. I know this is a hassle, but at the moment there's no other way to prevent that from happening.

General rule of thumb: yes, if you want to use the full functionality of Designer, you're best off sticking with the constructs it supports or otherwise branching off your BPMN file at a certain point as I mentioned above. To use the full capabilities of the engine, your best bet is to hand edit the BPMN file, which Designer can also help you with by providing schema validation.