The Use Case

As a solutions engineer at Lucid I have the chance to work with a number of different customers and hear about so many different use cases for Lucid. One thing that has come up more and more often is importing BPMN files into Lucid as an editable diagram. Now while Lucid provides a few different document import APIs for other solutions including virtual whiteboards and Visio files Lucid hasn’t had a good solution for BPMN files. 

The Solution

Lucid’s Standard Import allows for a JSON import to create Lucidchart diagrams in a pretty seamless way. Through the use of a conversion script we can import BPMN XML documents and create the Lucidchart documents via API.

Limitations

This conversion only supports the most commonly used BPMN shapes including the following:

• Parse start, intermediate throw, intermediate catch, boundary, and end events
• Recursively parse tasks (send, receive, user, manual, business, service, script), subProcesses, adHocSubProcesses, transactions, and callActivities
• Parse event, parallel, inclusive, and complex gateways
• Parse data objects
• Parse data stores
• Parse groups
• Schema representation for all the implemented shapes
• Authentication
• Request to Lucid API
• Lines
• Pool
• Text Annotation

Real Life Use Cases

A number of different customers have successfully migrated diagrams and documentation from iGrafx, IBM Blueworks and a few other BPMN specific tools that can export BPMN XML files.

Access to the Script

Our BPMN conversion script is available on our public Github repo that can be found here.

For examples using our extension API (and not just our rest APIs) please see our public Github repo here.