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Editing in Visio — Building a flow rule from an external Visio diagram

 About Flow rules

You can create a flow rule from certain Visio diagrams directly, without the need to customize a template or redraw the rule using Process Commander shapes. This facility allows the shapes, terms, and notation used by your company to carry over into the Process Commander representation.

This facility also allows business analysts who are not trained as Process Commander developers or do not have access to Process Commander to contribute to applications.

Follow the process presented here to make an external Visio VSD file becomes the value of a Custom Field on the History tab of a flow rule. Then, you can convert the Freeform shapes to specific Process Commander shapes (such as Assignment, Utility, and so on) with minimal changes in the visual appearance of the diagram.

  1. Obtain a VSD file representing a business process.
  2. Select> Integration > Import > Rule from File to start the Rule from File wizard. BYRNB 3/1/10
  3. Follow the wizard steps: Choose Flow as the rule type. Enter a flow rule name, a RuleSet, and RuleSet version.
  4. The wizard creates a flow rule with availability set to No/Draft. Click the Flow Editor toolbar button (Flow Editor) to start Visio.
  5. Every shape now has Freeform as the type. For each shape, choose a Process Commander type and click  Apply  . When one shape on the original diagram corresponds to multiple Process Commander shapes, consider calling a subflow to suppress the detail from the diagram.
  6. Complete the shape properties panel as appropriate for the shape. Add comment shapes, text, colors, and so on as desired.
  7. Replace each arrow or line on the diagram with a connector from the standard Process Commander template.
  8. Exit from Visio. Save the updated flow rule.
  9. Change the rule availability to Yes. Test the flow rule.

At any time later, you can open the original, unaltered Visio diagram. The system saves this as a Custom Field value on the History tab.

Definitions Custom Field
Related topics About the Rule from File wizard

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