Learn tips and tricks to be more familiar with our process editor. Work with swimlanes, activities, events, gateways or any BPMN2 shapes.

TIP! Looking for information on how to add, edit, and describe activities? Take a look at: Mapping activities

The process diagram can show your process and make it an interactive experience for the user.

The drawing tool consist of 4 parts:

If you want to edit a process diagram, you first have to turn on edit mode by clicking the toggler in the top right corner. You will see the toggler if you have process editing rights.

When edit mode is turned on, you can add new objects or rearrange existing objects.

If you want to add an object to the diagramme, you can drag and drop any of the 6 shapes on the far right of the toolbar to the diagramme area.

Once you have positioned the shape, the options menu is automatically shown, but you can always open (or close) it manually by doble-clicking a shape. Different objects have different setting options, see more about specific object options below.

If you want to delete an object, you simply click the bin in the top left corner and if you wish to connect it to another object, you can grab and drag the arrow on the center right of any object.

When you drag an arrow to another object, make sure you see an orange square around it. That is you cue that they are connected and the arrow will the follow the object and align itself to it, if you move it.

All objects must be placed inside a swimlane and cannot overlap other objects. If so, the process diagramme cannot be saved and a red square will appear to highlight the problematic object.

If you want more information about what is wrong with the object placement, you can click the warning triangle that appears as the first shape in the toolbar, when objects are not placed correctly.

TIP! We auto-save your process diagramme as you are working on it. Learn more here: Recover unsaved changes and previous versions.

Now that we have the basics down, lets take a closer look at the different options in the toolbar.

When you edit, the toolbar will have the following options available:

We will go through them left-to-right below.

Useto customize, align and/or rearrange roles/swimlanes

This tool is great if you want to:

The first three zoom optionsare pretty straightforward and will zoom in, zoom out and go back to normal view. Zoom to fit will give you a view of the full process in one screen.

Re-do and un-do will let you un-do an action or re-do it.

If multiple shapes are selected, you can use this feature to align them according to each other.

lets you restore deleted activities. Learn more here: Recover unsaved changes and previous versions.

The gear opens a settings menu for the layout and behavior of your arrows and the option to delete all custom bends (waypoints) added to the process diagramme:

When you choose the "Smart" option, the diagram automatically chooses a route between objects including bends/vertices. If you choose the "Straight" option, you get an arrow and if you choose "Jump-over" the arrows create a little bridge when they intersect, making it easier to see which direction the individual arrow is going.

TIP! If you are not happy with the automatically chosen route of an arrow, you can always manually adjust it afterwards.

Thetoggler is available if you have it enabled in your account settings as optional and turns on all the BPMN 2.0 shapes:

Finally we have the 6 shapes available in the Gluu standard notation. They are based on BPMN but a much simpler version.

The 6 shapes are:

Learn more about how to use the first three shapes by clicking the links.

They are used to indicate that the process flow breaks into two or more possible paths depending on the decision made.

It is good practice to write the question you want the user to answer in the decision gate text and then let the arrows going from the decision gate be dotted lines as opposed to solid to indicate to the person looking at the process that this is not a set flow in the process, only an optional one.

There are 3 different types of events:

Start events show what starts the process or what other process' output becomes the input for the current process.

End events show the goal that is achieved when the process or which process the current process' output becomes the input to.

You are actually able to add links to the events to other processes. Using an HR example of when this could make sense, the Onboarding process would be started by the Hiring process and end with the Training or Offboarding process.

Intermediate events are used to show parts of a process flow that do not require an activity with a work instruction but are important enough still that they need to show in the flow. It can be something done by a customer that needs to happen before the next activity in a process can happen for instance.

The text box is an option to add more information to a process diagram to help guide the user. We do, however, recommend that you use it sparingly, because if a text box is needed it is usually a sign that your process is too complicated to understand without the extra guidance and you should consider if it is better to revise the diagram and make it more user friendly rather than using the text box.

Having trouble getting the arrow to connect to an abject where you want it? Try clicking on an arrow and then moving the little black dot that appears. The dot is the point in the object the arrow aims for.

Double-click on a connection vertex (custom bend) to remove it.
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You can reposition the text for an arrow line by grabbing the text and dragging it to the desired position.

Shift + left mouse click (hold) will change your cursor from a hand to a plus sign and you can then drag a square around the objects you want to select and move them all at once.

Alternatively you can press and hold ctrl and then use your mouse to click on shapes to select them.