"null" exception in activiti designer when creating BPMN file

Hey Michel,

I'm checking on this today in the evening. It definitely should not come out as "null" in the error.

Patch to create better error output, in case sourceRef and/or targetRef IDs are not valid within *.activiti-Files. Most probably not relevant merge of files in progress for Designer 5.9

Hello Michel,

I've added some better error output to the Designer to check what the problem is. Actually your activiti-File contains alot of "invisible" (invalid) pictogram data, e.g. double flows, etc.

If you for example see something like this

<flowElements xsi:type="bpmn2:EndEvent" id="endevent3" name="End" incoming="flow8 flow13Def"/>

it is most probably an error, as "flow8" is incoming but not outgoing. My corrected patch will produce error messages like:

An exception occurred while creating the BPMN 2.0 XML: No valid sourceRef ID for sequence flow 'flow8' found.

This helps indeed, but we are currently on our way to merge the activiti and the bpmn20.xml-files, therefore I would suggest you see that you remove the double flows and check your activiti-file for any invisible elements and remove them too. Afterwards the BPMN xml should be generated again.

Thanks for your feedback !
FYI, the activiti file was created using only the Designer plugin, I didn't mess manually with the xml source.
I'll update the xml manually with your advice, no problem.

Regards
Michel

This should not occur anymore with the 1 model approach

Sorry, but in my opinion this is not fixed in 5.9 since 5.9 release does not include (yet ?) an update of the Activiti Designer plugin for Eclipse.
I would like this issue to be kept open for now.

The Activiti Designer 5.9 release will be a bit later than the Activiti 5.9 release. We expect to release Activiti Designer 5.9 within a week, therefore I resolved the issue for 5.9.