There are several workflow editor improvements that I believe would substantially alter how Mendix developers and citizen developers experience their development process
Left to right flow
The workflow should have a left to right option. By convention, most timelines are left to right, and being able to change to this would be ideal
Positionable workflows items
Microflow and domain model diagrams allow for repositioning of individual items – this would be a great addition to editing and making this more user friendly, and also is an enabler of the below. A “reset to top to bottom” button as well as “reset to left to right button” should be provided.
Swimlanes
Swimlanes are an absolute given in almost any workflow design tool.
They should allow for swimlanes, with a header, as well as functional dividers, which also allow headers.
They need to support both vertical and horizontal layouts.
When an item is moved from one “cell” (swimlane plus functional area), any reset of layout should respect this ownership
Non active items
Workflows can have annotations – having these be in a title/detail format where the title is always displayed, and clicking on the title displays the detail would be useful
Having the ability to add non-text annotations, such as “UML Actors” or software icons or other items to help explain the workflow would be useful (lowest priority of any of the requests)
Decision
The decision icon should be wrapped in a diamond like BPMN
Hi Mark,
You'd be pleased to hear that one of your suggestions was implemented!
The workflow editor can be visualised both vertically and horizontally now (so reading it from left to right). This was released with Mendix 10.6.0 version earlier in January (just learned about it in a demo). The release notes are here (see "the "10.6.0 - Other New Features" section) and this was also added in the platform documentation here (section 4.10).
You should be able to see the changes once you update the version of your IDE to this version.
Thanks again for your feedback, look forward to more ideas from you!
Sab