There are some bugs/proposals of BPMN models improvement.
1. When you work with large pool containing a lanes and you need to reduce/increase a size of pool you cannot select pool’s right side because in this case lane’s right side is selected. So to change pool’s size you should scroll to the beginning of the model every time. It is not convenient.
2. Adding additional information to the connection. When you want to show this information e.g. after flow’s splitting it always represented as object (square bracket with dotted line). It is not convenient in many cases.
3. Deleting of the lanes with comprising objects. When you want delete a lane and you want all objects on the lane survive you should select all objects, then move out the lane and complete deleting. It would be great you just delete lane and all objects remain.
4. It is not proposal but question – are there any plans to add Choreography diagram?
5. It is very useful thing – models grid. But when you use pools or/and lanes you cannot see it so you should to make ‘No fill’ color for pool. And there 2 problems:
- it is too hard to select such pool
- when you copy model and paste to Word it pasted with black filling.
Sascha Schneider on
Hi Alexander,
have you tried the latest version of Aris Express or the latest version of our standard products (which were released a few days ago)? We added some new features and changed some of the standard behavior for BPMN. Maybe you will like it (You can find them here: http://www.ariscommunity.com/users/sascha-schneider/2010-04-19-features-en-detail-bpmn-2-support-aris
To your points:
1) It is true that it is impossible to select the pool, if the header is not visible. But if you just want to increase or decrease the size of the pool, it is enough to select a lane inside the pool and resize it. The pool always adapt its size to enclose its lanes.
2) Adding addtional information to connections in Aris Express is restricted. If you look at other model types (e.g. EPC), there is only one single attribute which is offered for this - the name attribute. This is the same for BPMN models. The attributes "Text annotation 1-3" are used to annotate the connections in a bpmn-like way - with bracket and dotted connection. Our standard products have much more attributes, and therfore much more possibility to add information to connections. So it is not a restriction of BPMN handling, but of ARIS Express.
3) This is a good point. Adding and removing lanes without moving or cutting existing objects. We will try to consider this feature for improvements in future.
4) We don't have a schedule for these features yet.
5) In order to select a transparent pool, you have to click on the border or on the header (or the name attribute in case if it has been moved). The advantage of this behavior is, that if you are working with the objects inside the pool or lane, then it is easier, because you can use for example the lasso selection, instead of selecting the pool very often by chance. Unfortunately, this advantage leads to the drawback, that it is more difficult to select the pool. I don't see a satisfying solution for this problem yet.
That the pasted transparent pools are filled black in word must be a bug. But I cannot reproduce this, at least not on my machine. If it is still reproducible with the latest version, could you please provide the amf file and the word file, so that we have a chance to investigate and fix this bug.