which bpmn xml schema does current open bpmn use?

[chrisesposito4]

Hi,
I've compared the external xml files representing bpmn models created with either open bpmn and Camunda (the free 'get-started' desktop version of Camunda modeler, in case that matters). I see a few differences when comparing nearly the same toy network created in each - some of the namespaces are different at the top, and a few of the attributes are different (e.g., ExclusiveGateway in openBPMN has a gatewayDirection attribute that's missing in the saved camunda model). Does OpenBPMN use the bpmn 2 schema, and Camunda use the v1? We're working on code that processes the files in code, so knowing the right schema to use to help with parsing would be helpful.

Thanks,
Chris

[rsoika]

Hi @chrisesposito4, thanks for your interesst in our open source project.
To your questions: the namespaces in the header may differ as this is free declarative section to defeine how a XML standard parser will read the file. So this should not be a problem when you are procssing BPMN files in general.
We are based on BPMN 2.0 and support most of the elements needed for modelling.
You can separate a BPMN file in two parts - the declaration of the process flow (<bpmn2:process>) , which is essential for parsing and understanding the logic of a model, and the grapchical part (<bpmndi:BPMNDiagram>) which conains only the layout information - for execution this part can be ignored.

In addition BPMN 2.0 also introduced the concept of <bpmn2:extensionElements>. This secions can contain individual information readably by tools and engines.

So for your first anaysis: you can import any Camunda file into OpenBPMN and you can more or less import any OpenBPMN file into cammunda. But Cammunda ignores a lot of BPMN aspects (e.g. gateway direction flags) which are supported by OpenBPMN.

If you just whant to operate programatically on a BPMN file, the Open-BPMN-Meta Project may be helpfull. This allows you to navigate through a model and add, change or remove elements with an easy API.