FlowLine - a business process modelling tool married with an outliner

Posted by Rochus
Nov 12, 2018 at 01:54 PM

Slartibartfarst wrote: Slartibartfarst reply to @Rochus: 2018-11-12 1515hrs >Many thanks for the opportunity to review FL2 (FlowLine2).
Thank you very much for your review and your well-founded feedback.
>FL2 seems to be very stable - I can usually “break” a piece of Beta >software, so I’d guess this version had been well-tested in the field.

It’s been developed since ten years and a couple of my colleagues are using it, so its actually not Beta software; since it isn’t a commercial product documentation is lacking; but I’m working on this.

>different components/modules in the public domain

FlowLine is mostly based on Qt and some of my own modules I also use in other developments; I even use my own object database (which uses the backend of sqlite).

>Not sure whether there is a BPMN FIPS or whether FL2 is aligned with >such a FIPS.

FlowLine does actually not use BPMN symbols, but instead the syntax of Scheers Event-driven process chains (EPC, see en.wikipedia.org/.../Event-driven_process_chain) extended by (or should I say “relaxed by”) some BPMN semantics. It is no formal system though like Petri nets but rather a documentation an brain-storming tool. I use it e.g. to sketch workflows and draft schedules together with my team, where I present the live FlowLine display by desktop-sharing or wall projection.

>or of my lack of understanding after a cursory examination

I’m aware that the documentation is currently too sparse; thank you for your courage to just try.

> - Chiral scrolling works for up/down navigation in the diagram, but not >for sideways navigation (might be a problem with my TouchPad software?).

If you click in a white area of the diagram and press the CTRL key at the same time, you can scroll around in all directions. The same gestures changes the size of the object if you click in a frame or note. If you CTRL-click in the other diagram object types, the linking function is started (and stopped if you click in the target object).
You can zoom by framing the required section (click + drag) in the overview pane. Restore the original zoom by double clicking in the overview pane.

> - Undo/Redo functionality works in text edit mode, but not apparent >otherwise(?); could be a timesaver, if added.

FlowLine follows the database philosophy. Whatever you type or draw is directly stored in the database without ever explicitly saving. On the other hand if you want do delete something you are asked if you really want. There is no undo as in a document based tool. I actually missed it a few times during the last ten years, but implemnting undo for all functions would be quite an effort.

> - DELETE key doesn’t seem to do what it might intuitively be expected >to do in some circumstances.

The Delete key is only used for text. To remove objects, use the CTRL+D shortcut. If you open the context menu (right click) you can see the shortcuts assigned to the functions.

> - INSERT key functionality?

The Insert key is not used. Instead right-click in the diagram at the position where you want a new object and select the object type from the context menu. You can connect two diagram objects by CTRL-clicking in the first object and clicking in the second. If you click on the white background during link creation, a handle point is created; if you instead CTRL-click on the white background, a context menu is shown from where you can select an object to be created and linked in one operation.

>Would like to explore about viewing/printing on A4 or A3 layouts, with >off-page linkages correctly tagged, horizontal swim-lane >representations, etc.

FlowLine does not directly support printing (yet), but you can copy/paste diagrams or diagram parts to a word processor, or export to bitmaps, HTML, PDF or SVG.
Also note that you can either layout diagrams manually or - if graphviz is installed on your machine - let FlowLine do the layout (but watch out that layout changes cannot be restored).
Since FlowLine includes a scripting environment (based on Lua), additional GUI and export functions can be implemented by the user in principle (I should document the API first though).

Best, Rochus