Handling of collapsed subprocesses in Cockpit

As an operator, I can open a diagram associated with a collapsed embedded sub-process.

• In the BPMN view, I can click on the plus symbol of the sub-process or directly interact with the diagram element in some other way
• I can navigate back to the previous level of the diagram hierarchy
• All interactions of other Cockpit UI elements with the BPMN view have to automatically open the right sub-process diagram for the selected BPMN element
• The migration tool should have an indication for missing mappings in collapsed sub-processes
• A bonus would be some kind of tree representation of the diagram hierarchy

What can a user do with this feature?

• When modeling a collapsed subprocess, users will be able to edit its content without destroying the surrounding diagram layout. This will also work with nested subprocesses and also work in all modeling product modules
• When displaying a collapsed subprocess, users will be able to navigate into the subprocess to e.g. apply a token migration or investigate incidents in Cockpit.

Note: the workflow engine can already execute collapsed sub processes as they do not behave differently from regular subprocesses.

Which customer problem does it solve?

In many cases, our customers use Camunda to automate core business processes end-to-end. Often, these processes have a high degree of inherent complexity. In order to handle this complexity, BPMN proposes two constructs for decomposing processes visually: call activities and collapsed sub processes. Up until this point, Camunda supports call activities well but it does not allow users to model and view the contents of collapsed subprocesses.

• By adding this feature, we give customers a further tool for handling complexity in BPMN processes through decomposition. Collapsed subprocesses combine the execution semantics of regular sub processes with the properties of visual decomposition of the call activity, given users more options when it comes to selecting the appropriate modeling construct for their use case.
• The feature also further completes our coverage of the BPMN standard. This makes it easier when prospects and customers compare Camunda with other tools, use Camunda in combination with other tools or migrate to Camunda from other tools. Anecdote: 1&1 requested this feature since they have lots of process diagrams from Signavio with collapsed subprocesses. They do not want to convert these subprocesses into call activities as this would lead to different execution semantics at runtime (create additional (sub-) process instances instead of nested scope within a single process instance) which would require further migration effort.