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Eclipse Activiti Designer plug-in issue

kyphi
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Tijs,

I have a question about the Eclipse Activiti bpmn designer which kind of relates to issue ACT-1745. Do you have any plans anytime soon to improve the designer and fix the issue ACT-1745? I find it hard to understand why this is not higher priority on your list…

The issue I am talking about is the designer does not use the standard BPMN2 symbols. For example, the intermediate message event, the intermediate signal event or intermediate timer event use single circle instead of double circle. And there is more… When I showed a diagram created with Activiti designer to someone using BPMN2 as well, he told me I should start learning the BPMN2 basics. Why did he say that? Because he did not expect to see single circled events where only intermediate events are allowed. I had to explain to him that the diagram uses non-standard symbols here and there. I find this situation similar to the case where someone wants to use metaphors and other figures of speech, but they lack proper English writing. I think it's simply basic to use correct symbols. Otherwise, it's like calling Tom by James' name and wonder why Tom isn't reacting… I hope I'm not calling Tijs by the wrong name Smiley Happy

Please, think of this.

Thank you,

Me
6 REPLIES 6

trademak
Star Contributor
Star Contributor
Hi Me (nice name).

You are right that this should be improved. Are you willing to contribute to this as well?

Best regards,

kyphi
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Tijs,

If my name has any relevance for you, then here it is: Cristian, I am the one who posted to JIRA the issue ACT-1745. Or kyphi, if you read on the left of my posts…

I would love to contribute to Activiti, but my time is super limited.  Besides, I have no experience writing Eclipse plugins, it was never something I needed to do. Even if I wanted to contribute to Activiti engine only, in order to change the code I need to fully understand it first, which requires time. On the other hand, I am pressured in my current position to implement systems which could use Activiti as a tool related to BPM. I considered that even a modest contribution like mine, by posting issues to Activiti JIRA and/or forums is still more than nothing. That also took time, it does not happen instantly. I am rather a tester of your tools who gives feedback to the guys who know the Activiti internals in detail. I don't have your wingspan in Activiti, I know parts of it only. The vision is in your head and Joram's and others'. When I post the bugs and others in JIRA or forums, I do it to help improve Activiti, it's nothing against you or Activiti. I would like Activiti to succeed. Once I invested time in any product, I have a co-interest in its success. Otherwise, my investment is hurt, at least partially.

I think delaying the fixing of basic things delays the serious adoption of Activiti or even makes people look for alternatives. I know there are lots of issues and every issue reporter may subjectively think their reported issue is the most important, but I think it's objective to think that basic things should come first. I have found some other issues and I have some suggestions which might be convincing or not so convincing. I will try to post those as well on the forum or in JIRA. WOuld you encourage me to do that? It shouldn't be all or nothing, I try to give back as much as I can…

Me





trademak
Star Contributor
Star Contributor
Hi Christian,

We encourage people to be involved in the Activiti project in all kinds of ways, so yes providing feedback is really helpful.
But just like you we also don't have unlimited time. So a statement like "I find it hard to understand why this is not higher priority on your list…" is not really helping. We try to do our best to improve Activiti and choose the right issues to work on.
So please be involved in Activiti as much as you can and provide feedback. And this can be feedback like I think this issue is important to be fixed. We'll do our best to get it fixed.

Best regards,

kyphi
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Hi Tijs,

Thank you for your reply. I will continue to report bugs I found and try to contribute as well whenever I can. I have seen questions from people concerned about how to use JSF for user tasks. I have my own solution to this, a solution that doesn't require Weld or a full JEE, Tomcat is enough. Also, if you look at page 109 of Bruce Silver's second edition of BPMN Method and Style, you will recall that BPMN spec is lacking in that you can't signal to specific instances, but only do a broadcast. Being aware of this, the Activiti people seem to have done a good job to compensate for this by taking the engine ahead of spec and providing means to signal thru API to specific executions:

RuntimeService.signalEventReceived(String signalName, String executionId);

I have a suggestion here: because you have some Activiti-specific extensions to various standard BPMN elements, why not add an Activiti-specific extension to the intermediate throw signal event so that one can use an executionId to direct the thrown signal to a specific execution. One would pass in a process variable the execution id computed at runtime. This way, one can model the signal being thrown to a specific instance directly in the diagram as opposed to throwing it from some service task or another way. Let me know what you think, please.

Thank you.

Me

trademak
Star Contributor
Star Contributor
Hi,

Yes your suggestion for a the signal event would be a good one.
If you can create a JIRA for this and add some suggestion on how this should look like that would be helpful.

Thanks,

kyphi
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
Hi and thank you. I added this to JIRA as an improvement/enhancement: https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/ACT-1776