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Actions can be added as
before by selecting the type, and clicking and dragging from
one Stage to another.
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What has been added is the ability to drag
and drop the end of an Action, be it ‘untethered’
or attached, and drop it on another
Stage.
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This gives us ‘drag
& drop’ action editing at
last.
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Actions also no longer have to be
‘tethered’ to Stages at all
times.
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You can, as shown, add
an Action that is entirely separate.
It must be attached to a Stage or Stages
before Deployment, however.
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| We think this ability will
allow Analysts to add several Actions before any Stages when
designing a Process with Business users. We find that many users
are not as familiar with the concept of Stages as they are
with Actions, since they mainly see Actions in isolation in
systems.
Forcing the addition of Stages before linking
them with Actions has always seemed artificial to us. This
way constructs such as Activity Diagrams can be easily
converted to Process maps in Metastorm
BPM.
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Deleting Stages with attached Actions will
no longer delete the attached Actions.
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You are left with a ‘dangling’
Action. You select it and drag the end to a suitable Stage
to redirect it.
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Copy and paste is somewhat different
too. If we select an Action and copy from the
Context Menu …
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… we do not have a context menu
on the map, but pressing Ctrl-V give us a
new Action overlaying the original as
shown.
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| Note that the Action is the
same, which is good, but the Action Name has been changed to
keep it unique as is required. Note also that it is
unattached.
Stages behave in much the same
way.
Note that for both Stages and Actions, if the
Caption is the same as the Name, both get
updated.
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| One very common reason is
to turn an Archive Stage into a system stage and add an
Action to reintroduce Folders into the Process. This is no
longer so easy. You will have to delete the Stage and add a
new Stage with the same name (the Caption is not relevant) and an
appropriate action.
Another is to replace a Conditional Action with a
Timed Action for a number of reasons.
This is probably not too hard, but without the
simple ‘copy and paste’ of
‘code’ (MetaScript as we like to call it), it
becomes more complex to do.
We understand this is an issue, it is known and
acknowledged, but the effort to add the functionality is
quite significant. If enough customers request it, I am sure
it will be included in some future
release.
For the moment I feel we can live with it. At
design time, when most changes would be made, there is little
downside to adding one Stage and deleting another, especially
as the associated Actions do not get removed as they did in
previous versions. Once code has been added, it may be a
different story.
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Notice also that Forms do
not get automatically selected when adding new Stages.
This is probably because Forms are no longer associated
directly with Processes as they used to be. This means
you have to manually select the Form.
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Comments are now a little more
fancy.
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As before you can change the
font,
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but now you can also change the
shape…
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… and alignment of the
comment.
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Not that it always works as expected, mind
you!
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One extremely welcome addition is the
comprehensive Layout menu. This allows any kind of
alignment you may wish for. One very useful addition is the
‘Increase’ and ‘Decrease’
vertical and horizontal spacing. When inserting steps into
a Process these will be invaluable!
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We can now zoom the map properly. There is
a slider at the base of the process map
…
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… and a menu item to set
preselected zoom factors or size to fit.
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1. Designer User Interface
