Arranging, moving, and reusing processes in a hierarchy

Chapter 3 Building Process Hierarchy Diagrams

Arranging, moving, and reusing processes in a hierarchy

When building your PHD, you may find that you need to arrange or move your symbols, or that you want to reuse a process in more than one place in the hierarchy.

Arranging processes

To re-arrange your symbols, you can:

Right-click a root process or parent process symbol, and select Arrange Symbols from the contextual menu. All the sub-processes of the selected process are evenly spaced.
Select Symbol→Auto-Layout. All hierarchies are arranged in horizontal or vertical rows depending on the display preferences. The relative position of the processes within a hierarchy is unchanged. If you have previously selected one or more symbols in the diagram, you will be prompted to choose whether to layout the selected symbols or all symbols.

Moving processes

You can move a process or a decomposition link in the diagram window:

When you move a...symbol	Cursor	Result
Process		The process and any sub-processes if any are moved. If you drop the process onto another process, it becomes a sub-process of the second process.
Decomposition link		All the processes, beneath it in the hierarchy, are moved. Note that only the horizontal or vertical part of a link (depending on the display preferences) can be selected for the move, and you can only move a link up or down.

Reusing processes

You can reuse a process that already exists in your hierarchy in order to avoid duplicating its functions in your model.

To reuse a process:

Right-click the process within which you want to reuse the process, and select Reuse Process from the contextual menu. An object selection dialog box opens, which lists all the other processes available in the model.

Select the process that you want to reuse and click OK.

A shortcut to the selected process is added as a sub-process to the first process.

By default, the symbol of the shortcut displays its target. For more information about modifying this and other display preferences, see "Process hierarchy diagram display preferences" in the Customizing the BPM Environment chapter.

A process shortcut is always displayed as an atomic process. You cannot decompose the shortcut or expand its hierarchy, even if its target object has sub-processes.