Activiti Designer 5.9.0 released

[trademak]

Hi all,

I've released a new Activiti Designer version (5.9.0).
This is not just an upgrade with new features and bug fixes, we've also made a couple of changes to the core.
First, we don't have separate .activiti and bpmn20.xml files anymore. We now have one .bpmn file that contains the BPMN 2.0 XML information that's used to create a graphical diagram.
So any previous issues with the synchronization between the .activiti and the .bpmn20.xml file are gone.
Note that we changed the file extension to .bpmn. This has two reasons, first this is a default file extension for BPMN XML files. Second we need to have unique file extension for Activiti Designer diagrams, so .bpmn20.xml doesn't work, because this is seen as a XML file. To migrate your current diagrams to the new Activiti Designer release you only have to copy the .bpmn20.xml file and rename it to a .bpmn file. So actually there's no migration. Also note that this version of the Activiti Designer needs an Eclipse Indigo environment, so Helios is not supported.

Activiti Designer 5.9.0 highlights:

- Only one model file (with .bpmn extension), so no .activiti and .bpmn20.xml synchronization needed anymore.
- Support for nested sub processes.
- Support for signal events and event sub processes
- Improved the movement of boundary events and boundary events are now also moved with its parent.
- Upgrade to Graphiti 0.9.
- Lots of bug fixes.

So we welcome all users to try-out this new version of the Activiti Designer.
To get started copy one of your created .bpmn20.xml files to an Activiti project in the the new Activiti Designer and rename it with a .bpmn extension.
So you don't need the .activiti file at all.

For the next version we are looking at the implementation of the following features:

- Pools and lanes
- Text annotation
- Transaction and compensation support

But we welcome other requests for new features!

Best regards and enjoy,

[meyerd]

Awesome! Can't wait to try it out!

[jctgf]

Hi, Activiti n00b here

I have just upgraded to 5.9.0 designer, great improvement particularly now that the boundary events move with the parents, thank you!

Quick question: I renamed my definition and am now deploying my workflows in my test case like this:

  repositoryService.createDeployment()
    .addClasspathResource("diagrams/TestWorkflow.bpmn").deploy();

However the process is failing to load - I can't spawn a new instance of my process, whereas I could before (when filename was .bpmn20.xml). The file is found - no exceptions thrown - it logs that it's processing it, but it fails to get into the engine. I am using the activiti-engine 5.9.0 artifact from Maven.

Is this related to BpmnDeployer where from line 71:

      if (resourceName.endsWith(BPMN_RESOURCE_SUFFIX)) {
        ResourceEntity resource = resources.get(resourceName);
        byte[] bytes = resource.getBytes();
…

For now I am making a chance to .bpmn and copying to .bpmn20.xml. Any advice appreciated and thanks again for a great product

[trademak]

Hi,

Thanks for the question, because I didn't make that clear in my post.
We changed the file extension to .bpmn as I noted and the Activiti Engine will be able to deploy files with that extension from version 5.10.
But with version 5.9 this is not yet the case, so the process definition is not parsed and therefore ignored.
If you generate a unit test from the .bpmn file (right-click on the .bpmn file then choose Activiti - generate unit test) you can see how you can implement this without needing to change the file extension.

RepositoryService repositoryService = activitiRule.getRepositoryService();
repositoryService.createDeployment().addInputStream("process.bpmn20.xml",
    new FileInputStream(filename)).deploy();
So you can add the process definition file (the .bpmn file) as an input stream and use a filename with the .bpmn20.xml extension.
Then the file is deployed as it should be and you don't have to change the .bpmn file.

Best regards,

[oca]

Hi all,
For the next version we are looking at the implementation of the following features:

- Pools and lanes
- Text annotation
- Transaction and compensation support

But we welcome other requests for new features!

That's great thank you !
As you are talking about new feature, My top one would be "web services" (beeing able to produce a process from the designer that is close to the cxf provided sample). That means having pools, messages flows,  mapping wsdl/xsd to operations and messages. 

Cheers

Olivier

[pgadecki]

I have compared Manifest.MF for org.activiti.designer.model between version 5.8.1 and 5.9.0 and I've noticed that you're no longer exporting model package org.eclipse.bpmn20.
What is the reason for that?
I'm building extensions around Activiti Designer (custom property panels with filters based on selected node) and I'm referencing model classes in my code.

[trademak]

Hi,

Right, the model has changed to a simple Java POJO model.
The semantics should however be the same as the previous model.
So the CustomServiceTask functionality still works with CustomProperty objects.
You can find all available model objects in the org.activiti.designer.bpmn2.model package.
Let me know if you run into issues with your custom developed functionality.

Best regards,

[jctgf]

Thanks Tijs I will make the changes today.

[flieb]

Hi,

we are generating BPMN process-XML from another application, but without diagram information.
In Activiti 5.8, the designer reverse-engineered an appropriate diagram from the XML.
In Activiti 5.9, this doesn't work anymore.

Was this feature removed intentionally and is there a workaround?

Best Regards,
Florian

[trademak]

Hi Florian,

Good point. That's currently left out of the release, but it would certainly be possible to bring it back again.
It depends a bit on the user demand for this, because there's quite a bit of logic needed for this.
So if more users are in need of this I can certainly take a look at it.

Best regards,