Question on Activiti Designer

[andrea_zoppello]

Hi,

First off all my congratulation for the project! Great Stuff…


I'm evaluating activiti, and in particular the Eclipse Designer and i've some consideration question:

1) I appreciate the choose of Graphiti instead of GMF. Great choice…. In my opinion Graphiti is the
right way towards the generation of Graphical Editors..

2) I'm not able to get the bpmn2 xml file generated. When i right.click and choose "Export BPMN2 XML"
i've no error but i cannot find the bpmn2 file…. I've try to look at error tab in eclipse but it seems there are no
error, so i cannot figure where the problem is…

3) I see that when i create an Activiti project, a project with default maven layout is generated.
Now Maven sounds good, and it's great…. but there could be some sistuation where it would be possible
to use the designer without to be forced to use a maven layout for the project.

A BPMN modeler designer, could be ( and probably would be ) used in first step also by not-technical,
not-developer people…. so having the project structure to be maven like could be not the best choice.

3) I see that when  i use service task you must specify a Java Class as parameter
I'm not a BPMN2 Spec expert so i don't know how this is expresses in BPMN but in my opinion a service task
shoud take a "service identifier" parameter and let to a technical detail choice is this is would be a java class,
or something else….

4) Do you plan to support pool and lanes????

Andrea

[trademak]

Hi Andrea,

We'll share a list of improvements and features for the Activiti Designer in the coming days, so please provide feedback if you have the time.
The BPMN 2.0 with Activiti book from Manning will probably in MEAP in november. We're currently working on chapter 3 and 4, so we're progressing pretty well.

Best regards,

Tijs

[rrabbit]

I'm also struggling with using Activiti Designer.
It doesn't seem to support attributes like formkey for tasks or email service task type, so you have to add those things in the generated XML file. However, when you then extend the diagram and export again, it overwrites your changes.

Is it that the Designer is still incomplete and will support these attributes in the future, or am I doing it wrong?

[trademak]

The current version of the Activiti Designer was a first release which implemented the most common functionality.
The things you are missing right now will be available in the next release on December 1st.
A list of functionality that will be in there:

- Support for e-mail and manual tasks
- Field extensions editor for the Service task and support for expressions
- Formkey attribute for User tasks
- Possibility to add your own developed nodes to the Designer with the Designer extension functionality
- First start with an XML editor with content assist
- Automatic generation of the BPMN 2.0 XML and a process image after each save of the editor diagram (no need to for an explicit export).
- First start for a deployment editor with support to generate a BAR file

So on December 1st you will find a lot of additional functionality in the Designer.
Of course it will still not be feature complete, but we will enhance it in the coming versions.
It's very important to hear your feedback on this, because that will help us to get the tool better.

Best regards,

Tijs Rademakers

[rrabbit]

cool, thanks!

[unknown-user]

Hi all,

There is another aspect that speaks for implementing lanes in Designer:
Having lanes would open the possibility to assign candidate users/groups etc. to tasks in a more coarse grained way.
You do not need to open every task and to do the assignment, but you just do it for the lanes and then put the corresponding tasks on them.
Makes configuration easier and faster.

Regards,
Markus

[trademak]

Hi Markus,

That's true. We need to consider and prioritize this within the team.

Best regards,

[ronald_van_kuij]

I remember a discussion that actors assigned to tasks in lanes should not be considered persistent in BPMN. Bernd has more info on this. So it would still not work like e.g. in the older jBPM versions