BPMN
What is BPMN?
BPMN stands for Business Process Model and Notation. It is an OMG and ISO standard to design and document business processes in a graphical notation. You can find more details about the specification at bpmn.org.
The basics of BPMN
BPMN uses a graphical notation to let the user designs and explains its business processes, the main four components are:
Graphical Notation | Description |
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Activities are displayed as round rounded-corner rectangle and represent what work has to be done. Tasks are a really good start point to understand how activities works. | |
Gateways are represented as diamond shape and used to split and merge the flow. You can find more details about the different types of gateways in our current implementation here. | |
Events are displayed as circles and used to trigger actions like starting a flow instance. Read the following sections get started with events: - Start and Stop Events - Timer Events - Message Events - Boundary Events - Link Events |
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BPMN objects within your process are connected to each other with a sequence flow which are designed by a solid arrow. Messages can be sent to other processes with a message flow, shown as a dashed line. |
Advanced objects
After being familiar with the previous elements, you may want to take a look at the advanced objects
Graphical Notation | Description |
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Sub Processes are a specific type of activity that are used to make diagrams cleaner by encapsulating business process inside a business process. Take a look at the Sub Processes. page to know how to use it. | |
Call Activities are a specific type of activity that are used to call another business process that is contained inside a separate process diagram. Take a look at the Call Activities. page to know how to use it. | |
Pools and Lanes show who should perform a task and are represented as a rectangle, one pool can contains one to many lanes. See the specific Pool and Lanes page. | |
Message Flow allows you to have two or more processes interact by passing messages between processes Messageflow page. |