I read somewhere that it was possible to chain xslt’s together, so I thought it was worth a try to combine the Visio-to-BPMN transform and the BPMN validator into a single operation. And it worked! So now you can do Method and Style validation directly on diagrams created with the BPMN template in Visio Premium 2010. (You can still transform to BPMN 2.0 or XPDL xml if you want.) The updated page is still here. If you want to try it out, send me email and I will grant access.
BPMN Method and Style Validation Directly on Visio
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About the Author: Bruce Silver
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I will be interested in how you are doing xslt+validation. Please provide me with access if that is not too much trouble. I would lso like to chat with you at some point as I form an opinion on how to represent business processes as complex as Chevron’s and keep them evergreen.
Cheers. -Amitabh
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OK you are added to the list.
Thta looks interesting. Could I please have access to that page so I can give that a try?
Thanks,
Bruce,I have waited a couple of days – I would have expected a post from you here commenting on the BPM2010 keyote speach from Phil Gilbert (IBM) on th future of BPM. Esp. he has a quite pessimitisc passage on BPMN 2.0 and its value in his talk. See: http://www.bpm2010.org/
I haven’t had time to watch the 45 minute video but if Phil sounded, as you say, “pessimistic” re BPMN 2.0, I would guess he was just doing it to puff up Blueworks Live. You have to remember Phil is now VP of BPM at IBM. Wait until Process Server supports BPMN 2.0 next year. I predict Phil’s outlook on it will be a lot more upbeat at that time.
Hey Bruce,
I watched yesterday a very interesting video of you at global360 website, today I found your blog and this article. Also very interesting 🙂
Could I please have access to that page so I can give that a try?
Tihomir
Hello,
I think, it should be easyer to do the transformation with LINQ to XML. XSLT is challenging to get into C#
That may be true. I don’t know what LINQ is. Anyway, I used xslt for 2 reasons: 1. I know it, but I don’t know standard programming languages very well. 2. The validation rules operate on the BPMN 2.0 XML from a variety of sources. With xslt 2.0 I can embed the vdx-to-bpmn mapping inside the validation mapping.
OK that’s true LINQ is maybe easier because it’s actually an extention of C#. XSLT for me is much more powerfull but also very complex. I allways had problems with XSLT. It would be interesting for me to see how you solve this problem with XSLT.
I can only provide hints right now. You need xslt 2.0 because you can store the results of some processing as a sequence in a variable, like so:
… some xsl operations…
The hard part is actually not the xslt but getting the element type and relationships out of Visio.
Oops… I see that WordPress stripped out the xslt code from my comment. I guess I need to escape the < and > … maybe some other time.
Yes, indeed! I also saw that within an vdx file VISIO does not save informations about relationships between shapes.
They do, but you need to parse the v14:Relationships/@F DEPENDSON string, and then map the strange node references back to the shape IDs.
Please grant me access to try this out as well. TIA
To those who requested access and had valid registration on BPMS Watch, I added you to the access list.
–Bruce
Than you. Unfortunately, when I go to methodandstyle.com/bpmn-visio/
the message
“You do not have the appropriate group permissions to access this page. If you believe you should have access to this page, please contact an administrator for assistance.”
is appearing.
Tihomir
If you get this message and you are on the access list (and you are, as I added you yesterday), you just need to be logged in to BPMS Watch. If you still have problems email me directly bruce@methodandstyle.com.