Business Process Specs with BPMN

[Megan Kirk]

We use EA (v9.3) to capture our business process models using BPMN. As part of our models wee also capture textual descriptions against each of the elements.

To make EA display the correct BPMN symbol for collapsed sub-processes (if you use the BPMN Business Process element it uses the UML composite symbol) you need to use a BPMN Activity element and ‘make composite’.

Therefore, when we create a profile for our eaDocx document I can’t figure out a way to meet our need to display standard Activities differently to composite Activities as they are of the same stereotype.

Is there any other way of doing this?

Thanks,
MK

[eadocX Support]

I see your problem.
Back in the days of using just plain old Activity Diagrams for processes, we could choose a different stereotype for the ‘complicated’ Activities, and another for the simple, leaf-level ones.
I hadn’t noticed that the EA BPMN mechanism needs to use the <> stereotype for all BPMN-type activities. A truly strange implementation.
Using a stereotype in this way really makes a mess of how eaDocX tried to do things: different stuff gets different stereotypes, and different stereotypes print differently.
I’ve racked my brains for a solution to this, but I just can’t see one.
You clearly want the ‘complex’ Activities to print their child Activities, so they need to print as ‘inline’, so they can print their diagrams as well.
And this doesn’t look so good when printing the child, simple Activities, which have no diagrams or children.
So I’m afraid you’re stuck with always printing them ‘Inline’. Using ‘Compact Document’ should remove some of the useless headings etc, but I’m afraid we’ve been bowled a googly by EA.
🙁

[Doug Blake]

I don’t know if its relevant but the relationships between Activities and Processes has been under scrutiny recently in version 10 of EA
Doug

[Megan Kirk]

Thanks Doug, that does help. I will keep an eye on v10

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