BPMN – Page 3 – IMIXS-WORKFLOW Blog

March 25, 2017

New Release – Imixs-BPMN Report 1.4.6

The new version 1.4.6 of the Imixs-BPMN Plugin is released. The new release includes bugfixes and enhancements. The Imixs-BPMN Report Plugin which is part of the Imixs-BPMN modelling tool now provides a new feature to directly include the content of a XSL file into a report definition:

Reports allow the extraction of information from a Imixs-Workflow instance. Imixs-Workflow provides a flexible REST-API to customize the output of a report. This includes the XSL Transformation. With this feature, workflow information can be transformed in any kind of output, like XML, JSON and also different document formats like PDF or MS-Word or MS-Excel.

The workflow business suite Imixs-Office-Workflow includes a management dashboard with different char diagrams to visualize relevant business process data.

Imixs-BPMN is based on the Eclipse BPMN2 Project. The installation guide for Imixs-BPMN can be found here.

March 13, 2017

Don’t model Business Behavior in Objects!

During the past years I saw many projects where nearly any kind of business requirements was modeled into the technical object model, independent of the reason of the requirement. In many cases, modelling business requirements into a technical object model is quite ok and I agree with it in general. But also modelling business requirements into the affected business objects can lead into a ugly and complicated data structure. Let’s look into a short example to illustrate my thoughts: Continue reading “Don’t model Business Behavior in Objects!”

December 2, 2016

How to secure Business Objects

This post explains how you can secure your business objects in a model driven way, using the Imixs-Workflow engine.

Most applications deal with security in a functional way. This means that a business application typically defines different functional roles which are mapped to different users. For example let’s look on a simple Ordering System. In an Ordering System, we will have roles like

‘Order-Creator‘ – creating the order
‘Order-Approver‘ – validating and approving
‘Order-Executor‘ – execution

These roles are typical for such an business application and mostly tightly coupled to the corresponding business methods – e.g. createOrder(), approveOrder() and executeOrder(). This works well in a monolithic business application where you can control the security layers as also the business logic. But as more complex the business application becomes, also the enclosed security becomes more complicated. For modern application design, in addition, you often have to deal with external web services and business logic which need to be adapted easily to changing requirements. So this static security model leads into a hell of hard coded business rules or, what is worse, can no longer guarantee the security. Continue reading “How to secure Business Objects”

June 20, 2016

Imixs-BPMN Modelling Tool 1.4.4 Released!

With the latest version 1.4.4. of the BPMN modelling Tool Imixs-BPMN, the open source project ‘Imixs-Workflow‘ provides several enhancements in modelling human centric workflows. Among other new features it is now possible to model scheduled events on a working day basis. This allows scheduling events in individual time frames ignoring weekends. Another enhancement is the visualisation of custom task properties. ACL settings or custom editor settings are now visualized by info icons. Also the Process-ID of a Imixs-Task element is now displayed in the graphical representation of a BPMN model.

bpmn2-customtask

Some bug fixes align the new release with the latest version of Eclipse BPMN2 for the Mars Release. The new version can be downloaded and installed from the Eclipse Marketplace. Further information about the BPMN modelling tool can be found on the project homepage www.imixs.org. Take also a look into the tutorial “How to Create a Workflow Model“.

March 24, 2016

BPMN modeling for martians!

Version 1.2.4 of the Eclipse BPMN2 Modeller Plug-In is now available for Eclipse Mars. The new release provides a lot of improvements and bug fixes. See the New & Noteworthy page for what’s new in Eclipse BPMN2 Modeller. The latest version can be installed from the Updatesite.
Version 1.2.4 can be installed together with the Imixs-BPMN Plug-In which is providing extensions to deploy a BPMN 2.0 model into the Imixs-Workflow Engine. Imixs-Workflow is an open source workflow engine for human-centric business process management (BPM) based on the Java EE technology stack. Read more about Imixs-Workflow here.

March 8, 2016

Imixs-BPMN- new Update available

Today we released a new minor update of the Imixs-BPMN Modelling Plugin for BPMN 2.0. This update contains some layout improvements and also updates to the latest Mars release 1.2.3 of the BPMN2 Plugin.

The new Imixs-BPMN Plugin now also provides a new feature to model schedule events by defining a time-period/delay in workdays. This new modelling feature will be supported with the next upcoming release of Imixs-Workflow 3.7.0.

The plugin can be installed from the Eclipse Marketplace or from the Imixs Update Site:
http://www.imixs.org/org.imixs.eclipse.bpmn2.updatesite/

The latest BPMN2 Plugin for Eclipse Mars can be installed from:
http://download.eclipse.org/bpmn2-modeler/updates/mars/1.2.3

November 29, 2015

How to model human-centric workflows with BPMN

The Imixs-Workflow project provides a new tutorial explaining how a human-centric workflow can be modeled with Imixs-BPMN. Imixs-BPMN is a BPMN 2.0 modelling tool based on the Eclipse Platform. The BPMN Tool allows to design workflow models in a very flexible way. The BPMN 2.0 standard elements are extended by Imixs-BPMN providing custom task and event elements. The tutorial explains how to model typical scenarios of a human-centric workflow. Those models can be executed immediately in the Imixs-Workflow engine. See also the project ‘Imixs-Office-Workflow‘ an an example of an integrated workflow suite.

November 26, 2015

BPMN Modeller not Loading Correctly

After an update of the Eclipse-BPMN Plugin or the Imixs-BPMN Plugin in some cases it can happen, that an existing process model is no longer loaded correctly into the BPMN editor. In this case it is recommanded to remove the file

org.eclipse.bpmn2.modeler.core.prefs

which is located in the Eclipse workspace under the folder .settings/

After restarting Eclipse the BPMN Plugin is working again correctly.

November 20, 2015

Imixs-BPMN 1.3.0 Released

The new version 1.3.0 of the BPMN modeling tool “Imixs-BPMN” is now finally released. The version supports the current Mars release of the Eclipse platform and offers several improvements and bug fixes. The allocation of write- and read-access in a running process instance has improved within the new version. ACL settings can take place now not only at the event level, but also directly in the process level. This allows to model business processes with different ACL settings much faster. The new ACL settings are supported by the Imixs-Workflow Engine since version 3.4.0. Another improvement represents the modeling of ‘versions’ within a process model. Thus new versions can be creating during a running process. Versions of a process instance can, for example be archived by the Imixs-Workflow Engine. So complex business processes become more transparent with the new modeling features.

The Imixs-BPMN Plugin can be installed from the Imixs-BPMN UpdateSite or directly from the Eclipse Marketplace.

November 8, 2015

Imixs-BPMN – New ACL Feature for Next Release Planned

The next upcoming Update of Imixs-BPMN includes a new functionality concerning the security API of Imixs-Workflow. With the new version it will be possible to define an ACL for a process instance on the Task level in a BPMN diagram. In earlier versions this feature was only available on the Event level. With this extension now setting the ACL for complex process models is more easy and models can be created faster.

In addition the new release also includes a bug fix concerning the ImixsCatchEvent. The Imixs-BPMN Plugin can be installed from the Imixs-BPMN UpdateSite or directly from the Eclipse Marketplace.