BPMN support? about elsa-core HOT 15 OPEN

@sfmskywalker Hey there! I would love to see BPMN support, it is the only thing that currently prevents us from switching to ELSA. We love ELSA, but without BPMN it would mean additional work to translate processes, and it outweighs the benefits for us.

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BPMN web modeler: https://bpmn.io/toolkit/bpmn-js/

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Our current plan is to start working on this in Q4, contingent on our reliability & performance deliverables.

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Yes! It’s been a long-standing wish to have BPMN interoperability. I don't think I have a nice extensibility endpoint atm to translate between formats, but I do intend to fix that. This would totally allow you to implement e.g. a BPMN import/export function. Elsa doesn’t support everything yet that is in the BPMN spec, but we could work in that.

You're more than welcome to contribute of course. However I’m in the middle of a big cleanup (see “simplify” branch), so I think it’s best advised for that branch to get merged in. Hopefully after the weekend.

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some time has passed ...
I think I finally have enough time to start implementing or at least try to implement the first parts for the BPMN functionality ...
How do you think it should work?
Convert the BPMN structure to JSON, which can then be imported?
Given lost information from import, this would likely be a one-way import.
Or would it be conceivable to expand the classes in Elsa with the missing properties in order to be able to export the whole thing back to BPMN?

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maybe it will be useful

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Support BPMN will be powerful. @sfmskywalker

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Just MO here, BPMN is very powerful, but it becomes really complex and is an art in it's self.

I can see that under the hood ELSA could support BPMN, or import it... Just check out the spec:
https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/PDF

What I like about ELSA is the focus on an easy/slick UI and I'm guessing the market here is low code automation where it's easy to use by 'normal' people....something that BPMN might not be.

The BPMN 2.0 spec means you might need to have the BPMN diagram notation as well, so using something like https://bpmn.io/ which at least you have a ready-made designer! But it is abstracted from anything business domain related.

If you look at Microsoft Flow, you can import BPMN and create flows (with some restrictions), but the whole flow thing gets messy.

I'm just throwing this out there, I just feel BPMN might not be ELSA's true north.

If you want BPMN you might just go to something like Camunda which is open source and has a stack of other products (although it is java there are some .net client connectors).

Feel free to ignore me!

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There are many dupes of this which might have worthwhile discussion. There is also a discussion thread at #639 . I've assigned it low priority as it doesn't seem to be on any milestones right now. But "low priority" certainly does not have to mean "never".

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@sfmskywalker Is there any update?

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For BPMN support, we need Elsa 3 which is designed to support different kinds of workflows. Initially it comes with a simple Flowchart and Sequence as diagram types. Once it’s on par with Elsa 2, we might start to think about a BPMN diagram type. But, as always, it depends on how its priority relates to those of other features and what our bandwidth looks like.

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@craigfowler @sfmskywalker am I right in understanding that the project aims to release 3.0 first, and then consider how we might approach introducing BPMN to the project? or are we looking at BPMN support /for/ the 3.0 release? do we have any gut feel as to how far off 3.0 might be?

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That's exactly right; the initial 3.0 release will be without BPMN support. The architecture, however, allows for adding BPMN support later on.

The way things are looking now, the 3.0 release candidate will happen around the end of this year/beginning of next year. I already started work on documenting 3.0, which helps me to identify important missing pieces before the release.

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Is there an timeline when BPMN support is available ? We also would love to use Elsa in our project but the missing bpmn support prevents this. We still got a bit time, so i wanted to ask you for current plans of the implementation.

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thank you for that info.. hopefully you will also provide a migration of existing workflows. that would be great😁

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