How to switch between horizontal and vertical lanes, and what should I do?

Developers
1

How to switch between horizontal and vertical lanes, and what should I do? The desired effect is the ability to switch freely！

2

Hi @Tony_Brown,

See Vertical pool in Camunda Modeler - #8 by sombrek

In short: At the moment you have to decide up front whether you want to model horizontally or vertically and then stick with it. You decide for one style by editing the XML.

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Hello, the effect I want is to first create a horizontal lane, and then switch back and forth between vertical and horizontal on the designer. Do you have any code on the implementation method that you can refer to instead of processing by changing the XML file?

4

That’s currently not possible. That feature would need to be implemented from scratch.

I’m curious and I’d like to understand your use case for this feature. I’ve worked with users on vertical models but this is the first time someone would like to switch back and forth. Could you please elaborate?

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5

I mainly encountered such a requirement in the following scenarios and hope to further explore it:

  1. Business scenario: Multi perspective process display
    Our business involves cross departmental collaboration processes (such as order approval, project management), and different roles have different preferences for process views:
    Vertical swimming lane: suitable for displaying task details of a single department/role (clear vertical timeline, focused task steps);
    Horizontal lane: Suitable for showcasing a panoramic view of cross departmental collaboration (with intuitive horizontal division of responsibilities and clearer parallel/interactive relationships between process nodes).
    For example, when management needs to have a macro view of cross departmental collaboration efficiency, they hope to use horizontal lanes; When the specific execution team needs to focus on their own tasks, they hope to switch to vertical lanes. This dynamic switching can enhance the flexibility of views for different roles.
  2. Collaboration requirements: Flexible adaptation to different terminals/layouts
    In the adaptation between web and mobile devices, vertical lanes are more user-friendly when displayed vertically on mobile devices, while horizontal lanes can display more details in large screens or printing scenarios. In addition, users may need to dynamically adjust the lane direction based on the canvas space in the same process designer (such as switching to a vertical layout when there is insufficient horizontal space) to avoid overlapping or excessive scaling of process elements.
6

Thanks for the clarification.

You might be interested in a BPMN feature that allows one process to have multiple diagrams. See this codebox example. There are buttons at the top to switch between diagrams.

There is basic support for this feature in bpmn-js, so it could be a starting point if you’re willing to invest some development. It may require some hacking though, depending on your processes.

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