Item Definitions in Activiti modeler and engine

[rdiaz1]

Hi guys,

First congrats with the launch of Activity
We´re developing our own bpmn 2.0 editor and after a thorough investigation about work flow engines suppoting bpmn 2.0, we consider Activiti engine the current best option. We pretend make executable processes in your engine, but there is some questions like the item definitions support wich we don´t know how tread in Activiti.
In the modeler, a data object´s item definition for example, looks like transparent to the user, although in the xml schema we can found them. However the modeler make possible express the Item Defintion for an error event.
My question is how we can define item defintions in the modeler, and wich is the effect in the engine for them.

Thanks a lot.

[tombaeyens]

Will it be an open source bpmn 2.0 editor?

[jbarrez]

Currently, item definitions are parsed, but not yet used by the engine.
Using item definitions in the Modeler is not yet 100% completed, as far as I know.
Because a lot depends on the context and its hard to make it user friendly.

What excatcly would you need or expect from the modeler? A plain way of defining item definitions (not very user friendly, I think) or something else?

[rdiaz1]

Yes, of course the editor is open source…We´re using Eclipse GMF to developing it..
We don´t have yet a web good enough to show you the editor but if  you´re interested we can give you the sources and make a build for you, or maybe a video..

[rdiaz1]

Yes the item defintion support is a question to resolve for us as well. This is the reason because we wonder how the Activiti treat with them..Actually, is not only the use of item defintions a mistery for us, because the data modeling in general..
The bpmn 2.0 specification is not good enough for us about this subject. Maybe, we could help each other, contributing ideas about it..
What do you think about my proposal?

[jbarrez]

The data sstuff in BPMN 2.0 is quite a big topic, hence why we decided to focus forst on the most used constructs, and work out ioSpecification, etc later. So I'm afraid that at the moment we havent got implementation knowledge.