Task Autonumbering

Hi Francisco,

Those things are typically done with custom reports.

Best,

Veronika

Hello Francisco,

Veronika is right that you can write a script. But what is the use case? How should it work? Numbering from left to right? Always rerun the script when there is a change in the tasks sequence? In any case you should use a custom attribute for that and not the name of the task. Using the name you can no longer reuse objects based on the repository.

Regards

Klemens

Hi,

It is a very common use case, and usually, there are two algorithms: or, as you mentioned, is a horizontal numbering. Or are there two loops in sorting - first, you get branches and sort activities between events/gateways; second, you sort branches. Usually, it looks perfect. The key idea of this approach is that when you add an activity somewhere in the middle of the process, you can quickly re-code all activities that follow.  Codes themselves, even if they are not extremely perfect, help you to refer to activity within different reports, e.g. SOP.

Usually, we use a standard attribute Processing code. It is not necessary to create a custom attribute for this purpose.

I fully agree with what Klemens said. If you use activities for the the numbering, then this will prevent you from using them as occurrence copy in other models. If you want to do an export, e.g. word file, we have implemented it a bit differently than Alexander. The script basically creates a definition copy of the model adds numbers to a custom attribute (which are then also placed) from left top to right bottom. Then, "exports" the diagram and the and the numbers as a graphic to the word document. In addition we have an activity table that also uses the same numbers for the activities and provides the description of all the activities. The definition copy is needed as published content shall not be altered. Hope this gives you some helpful ideas.

Best,

Veronika

Thank you all,

I understand the guidelines for numbering. My question is, does ARIS has a feature that "auto numbers" tasks? 

We are in the process of migrating content from another tool (IBM Blueworks Live) that has this feature. And our current users are wondering if ARIS provides that capability out of the box, or do we need to do scripting to accomplish it. 

From the responses, I guess that the answer is that we need to do scripting to auto update numbering within a process model. 

Thanks again. 

Hi Francisco,

Yes, you are right. Autonumbering is not an out-of-the-box feature in ARIS.

Best,

Veronika

Hi Francisco,

is your use-case that you want to have numbers on the symbols in the process diagram in order to have a reference to the rows of a table you are generating from the model in a report document, e.g. a process handbook? This is typically done on-the-fly in such a report.

In the discussion above it is apparent, that any numbering scheme comes immediately with the use-case of re-numbering, so the numbering is not stable over time. You would not refer to any of those numbers elsewhere as a cross-reference. An on-the-fly numbering hence should be fine. 

A different use-case is the creation of human-readable identifiers for objects. This is supported by ARIS in the "ID" attribute. They are meant to be stable identifiers over time, no matter how often the process (or whatever other object) changes. Of course you cannot expect those to be in any particular order, because they should never be changed.

There are cases, where customers want to see a structural numbering like "1.15.3.108" in a process hierarchy. But these also tend to be either unstable or you have to do some tricks to keep them unique in history after renumberings occur.

Regards, M.