feature suggestion: add a description for transitions

[sebastian.s]

Good morning!

What do you think of adding a description to transitions? Normally I prefer to use short "kind of technical" names for the transitions but I would rather have a long name or a description in the process diagram which is shown by the console.

So my suggestion is to add an attribute description to transitions and to display the transitions' descriptions instead of their names in the diagram. If the description is not set or empty the name could be displayed instead. By the term description I don't mean a long text but rather a long user friendly name for the transition in contrast to a short technical one.

Does this sound reasonable to you?

[sebastian.s]

https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBPM-2595

[camunda]

Hmm, why do you need that "technical short name" and don't just use the name as business name (meaning the longer description")?

There is no real downside of it, or is it? Introducing a new attribute is not necessary here in my oppinion, but correct me if I am wrong or missing something.

Cheers
Bernd

[koen.aers]

Are we back in the 'id' versus 'name' discussion? ;-)

Cheers,
Koen

[sebastian.s]

Hi Bernd, hi Koen

I don't want to start over old discussions again but since I missed it what was the outcome of this diskussion? Was this the on about the question if task names should be unique or not?

Hmm, why do you need that "technical short name" and don't just use the name as business name (meaning the longer description")?

There is no real downside of it, or is it? Introducing a new attribute is not necessary here in my oppinion, but correct me if I am wrong or missing something.

From my point of view transition names should help business users understand the process.

When coding and using for example taskService.completeTask(taskId, outcome) I somehow don't feel comfortable to use this long name even with spaces since transition names need to be unique for one task so they name is a kind of identifier or even a signal name to take this specific transition.

Furthermore to facilate development of clients using the engine I would like to use a a kind of convention for transition names. For example after tasks which implement a user's decision which path to take in the process I'd prefer to give the same names to the transitions in different processes but a process specific description or long name for the transition. I hope I was able to point out my aspects.

cheers
Sebastian

[camunda]

Okay, there may be some use cases. On the other hand I think you confuse people as well (what to use when). For the moment I don't feel it as a big problem.

If you talk about real business models (not for technical people) you face a lot of additional requirements not implemented in jbpm yet, so this is a different story.

So in summary I would leave it as it is or wait for enough people to show use cases, that it is really that important.

[sebastian.s]

Thanks for giving your view on this, Bernd. There is no doubt that are still lots of additional requirements not implemented in jBPM yet.

However I don't see the point of confusing people. Because the way I described it seems quite clear to me:

There are transition names which are obligatory since they are used for the actual execution and there are description or long-names which are optional. Generating process diagrams shows the transition names unless descriptions / long names have been given.

[camunda]

It may be clear for you, and even for people reading the docs... So for the others (the most people ;-)) it may get confusing, especially if the UI switches what it shows...

[sebastian.s]

You might be right, Bernd. But what about using a configuration setting which switches whether names or descriptions are shown? So the description could be completely optional.