Process Analytics — September 2023 News

4 min readOct 2, 2023

*Back to school by* *Denisse Leon* on Unsplash

Welcome to the Process Analytics monthly news 👋.

Our “always” reminder: The goal of the Process Analytics project is to provide a means to rapidly display meaningful Process Analytics components in your web pages using BPMN 2.0 notation and Open Source libraries.

Welcome to our September update 🗓️. In this edition, we anticipate your participation in Hacktoberfest 2023 🎃, introduce new features 🛠️, and provide updates on our demos and tools 🔍. Let’s get started with the details!

Promotion highlights

We’re onboard for Hacktoberfest 2023!

We’re pleased to announce that, following our participation in previous years, the Process Analytics team is once again joining Hacktoberfest 2023. For those unfamiliar with Hacktoberfest: it’s the premier global open-source event. Throughout October, open-source enthusiasts, known as contributors, are motivated to contribute to various open-source initiatives. At the same time, project leaders are encouraged to get their projects ready to accept and use valuable help from people all over the world.

The Process Analytics team diligently prepared throughout September to set up diverse contribution categories for this event. Our various repositories, including the bpmn-visualization TypeScript library, the bpmnVisualizationR package, and the bpmn-visualization examples repositories, are all set for Hacktoberfest. We’ve labeled selected issues with hacktoberfest to highlight where contributors can focus their efforts. You can view all these labeled issues across our repositories here.

If you’re interested in contributing, please start by reading our detailed issue on Hacktoberfest 2023 contributions.

What else? 🧐 We’ve updated our promotional application to align nicely with the Hacktoberfest 2023 theme. If you’re seeking an effective way to spotlight your repositories with a touch of Hacktoberfest elegance 💫, our app is at your disposal. Elevate your project’s visibility and join the festive spirit of open-source collaboration!

🌐 New testimonials section

🎉We’re thrilled to unveil a fresh testimonials section on our website. If you’ve used our library and have feedback, or wish to share your insights or use case, we’d love to feature you! Contact us via our public channels listed on our website.

API and Development News

bpmnVisualizationR Package

Version 0.5.0 was released this September and is now available on CRAN 🎉. Beyond the addition and styling of overlays, this update allows R users to style BPMN diagram elements using create_shape_style and create_edge_style as shown in the example below.

bpmn-visualization TypeScript library

In September, we released two versions: 0.39.0, 0.40.0.

A highlight from these releases is the introduction of new APIs designed to enhance the retrieval of BPMN elements. With these improvements, data access is both efficient and precise. In earlier versions, the element retrieval APIs (getElementsByKinds and getElementsByIds) provided both the HTML and semantic details (like name, id, and incoming/outgoing parts). But there are scenarios where only the semantic information is desired, like when identifying incoming/outgoing elements to trace a path in the BPMN.

To address this, we’ve introduced new APIs: getModelElementsByKinds and getModelElementsByIds. Here’s a snippet of their usage:

const modelElements = bpmnVisualization.bpmnElementsRegistry.getModelElementsByKinds(bpmnKinds);

const modelElements = bpmnVisualization.bpmnElementsRegistry
 .getModelElementsByIds(bpmnIds)
 .filter(semantic => semantic.isShape);

Experimental add-ons

In our July news update, we introduced a new experimental library, bv-experimental-add-ons. This library is set to introduce a range of new features, with a primary focus on computing and visualizing paths in BPMN.

From a technical standpoint, this project facilitates the extension of the bpmn-visualization library through a plugin mechanism. Curious about its operation? We’ve prepared the OverlaysPlugin demo, which shows you how to develop and register plugins. OverlaysPlugin lets you hide and show overlays without removing them from the view. You can explore the source code here.

Additionally, our initial efforts in path computation have culminated in the PathResolver demo. This demo provides a mechanism to compute and visualize a path on a BPMN diagram based on a specified set of nodes.

You can access the demos crafted for this project here. They’re also conveniently available from our main demos page.

For more insights and the latest updates, be sure to visit our releases page.

ICPM 2022 demo update

We’ve released an update to the demo presented at the ICPM 2022 conference. This updated version showcases a compelling example of dual interactions on the BPMN diagram. When you hover over an item in the popover, the corresponding BPMN element for that item becomes highlighted.