Best practice for creating process programmatically

Developers Modeler
1

Hi,
i need to create elements in my bpmn process programmatically
i want the user to create a simple tree which will hide a bpmn sub-process, i don’t want the user to be aware of the bpmn-elements (for example sub-process), thus he will see simple tasks.

what are the best practices to create elements programmatically, and where i can find examples ?

example of my flow:

  1. user will click on add node
  2. a popup will open to the user to enter some applicaiton data
  3. i will need to create the connetions, gateway including expression, and a new sub-process which hide few tasks in it

image

2

What have you done already to achieve this? You can programmatically model diagrams using the modeling API only.

3

There exists two community projects that allow you to create diagrams using higher level APIs:

Both use the core modeling facilities @philippfromme mentioned under the hood.

You can use the Modeling API without abstractions, too:

var bpmnModeler = new BpmnModeler(...);

var modeling = bpmnModeler.get('modeling');
var elementRegistry = bpmnModeler.get('elementRegistry');

// remove shape with ID 'some
modeling.removeElements([ elementRegistry.get('someTask') ]);
4

according to the source code, i found different ways of creating the process
1.use ElementFactory to create shapes, then use the modeling api to append it to the viewer, in my case i found that AutoPlace class is better, since it provides simple layouting
2. use modeling.createShape for creating shapes, and modeling.connect for connecting between elements

and according to this example - https://github.com/bpmn-io/bpmn-js-examples/tree/master/bpmn-properties
i see usage for moddle api.

so for me its unclear what is what, moddle, modeling, elementFactory ?

i already found the bpmn-js-cli, but wan’t sure if i can use it for creating my process. so i can use both the * bpmn-js-cli and the * bpmn-js-cli-modeling-dsl as a simpler API ?

thanks
Elia