Skip to main content
Idea

How to change existing shapes to BPMN 2.0 without redrawing

  • June 13, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 81 views

Alexander B

Hi! My team created a bunch of flows using standard library with Flowchart shapes. For some weird I can't insert images now but you get the idea. Now we need to use BPMN task shapes that as you know have specific functionality. If you click on a task from BPMN 2.0 Library you get additional screen where you can set special attributes like display some fancy icons over the shape to show if that's manual or script activity etc.

The problem is that only works with Tasks added from BPMN 2.0 library. Not with the tasks from Flowchart library.

How can we change all our existing shape to BPMN 2.0 Library? The alternative is to manually redraw everything and that's insane. Lucid only allows to change shape type inside current library but we are not even changing shape types we just need to add some functionality from BPMN 2.0 library to existing charts.

Why there is no Find and Replace feature for this? I tried copy-paste over but it doesn't replace either.

 

Any workaround?

 

 

 

Comments

Micah
Forum|alt.badge.img+20
  • Lucid community team
  • June 13, 2023

Hi Alexander thanks for posting in the Lucid Community! You're correct about the following functionality:

  • The Change Shape ability is available only within a certain shape library not between libraries and is only available for specific common shape libraries such as Flowchart shapes. 
  • The abilities within the right panel are specific to the shape library you're using - the BPMN 2.0 functions as shown in the screenshot below are specific to BPMN shapes while org chart tools are available only to org chart shapes etc. This is why these BPMN options are not available for your regular flowchart shapes.

Unfortunately it's not possible to find/replace or convert from one shape type to another across libraries. I certainly understand how that would be use though and especially impactful for your work here. I've logged this feedback for review by our development team which utilizes requests like these when prioritizing improvements to Lucidchart. If you have additional detail or use case context that you'd like to share we'd love to hear more via this thread or our feature request form. I'm so sorry for the inconvenience and thank you again for your feedback here!

I would love to understand what functionality the BPMN 2.0 tools are offering that you'd like to incorporate into your flowchart. There might be a different way we can incorporate it with another tool!