graph structure to BPMN file

Question

Hi,

I'm working on analytic process that results in a graph structure,
consisting of nodes edges and attributes (attributes for nodes - what happens inside them, attributes for edges - conditions to move between the nodes).
I have only functionality and no layout. my final goal is to result with a BPMN file,
one could open in a tools as Camunda Modeler.
is there a way to leverage your product for the task? if not, can it help creating some of the steps for the BPMN, as definition of tasks, gateways, sequence-flows according to the nodes edges and attributes, or create a BPMN layout (BPMNDiagram part) if BPMN process part is provided?

thanks much,
Kamashay

Answer 1

Well, yEd does offer BPMN symbols and a BPMN layout algorithm. You could create the diagram structure manually and then use yEd's BPMN layout algorithm to arrange your diagram. However, yEd is not able to export to a BPMN specific format. You could try saving your manually created BPMN diagram as GraphML (yEd's native, XML-based file format) and then use XSLT to transform GraphML into a format supported by e.g. Camunda Modeler.

I think a much better approach would be using one of the yFiles programming libraries, though. (yEd is built upon the Java version of yFiles.) The yFiles libraries provide (high-level) APIs for creating, arranging, and visualizing graphs. The BPMN symbols used in yEd are included as source code demo with yFiles. And even though the yFiles libraries do not provide an export feature to a BPMN format out-of-the-box, it is possible to implement such a feature in a custom application.
The yFiles libraries are available for several platforms (HTML5, C#, and Java) and may be evaluted free-of-charge. I suggest to give yFiles a try.