Linking Element Properties with external Files

[rsoika]

I want to share a new feature that we implemented in Open-BPMN that offers a more extensive way to edit complex content in BPMN 2.0.

In BPMN for example you can add a 'documentation' or a 'script' to various elements in a diagram. For this we implemented a UI-Extension that displays a Property Panel based on JSONForms displaying input fields and textareas for different kind of element properties. This allows you to edit custom parts of a .bpmn file.

We implemented now a new custom JSONForms control that allows to link the content of a single property with an external file located in the same workspace - simply by entering a file URI starting with file://.... In this way users can now externalize long documentation or complex scripts to separate files and link them with the editor. Open-BPMN automatically resolves the links on save/load and updates the corresponding parts within the BPMN file. In this way the resulting file is still always a valid BPMN file that can be edited with other BPMN editors.