Limitations of the Process Import

  • Existing MDM workflows do not have associated layout information that allows for placing activities and transitions per your preference. Import functionality, however, automatically generates layout information, and align activities and gateways rigidly on a grid. This generation may sometimes lead to an unintended layout which you may have to manually change to rearrange the activities and gateways to a more appropriate view.
  • Import functionality also has practical limits on the size of the imported workflow. If it is too large, the workflow layout will be confusing and will require significant user intervention to be reasonable to use. While the import functionality works with an arbitrary number of activities, the practical limit is around 50 activities. It is recommended to break the workflow down into smaller subflows in case of large workflows.
  • The automatic layout though useful, still required some manual rearrangement in the main process view.
Note: The lack of layout information is the main reason why workflow export, its subsequent use and re-import is not useful, since the workflow will have changed the layout each time it is imported. Therefore, the import functionality should be viewed as a one time conversion from an existing workflow into a graphically editable process model. The user is encouraged to view the copy of the workflow definition inside the MDM Process Designer as the primary one (perhaps by sharing it through a source code repository with others) and not the version deployed in the MDM Engine.