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  1. OMG Issue

BPMN21 — Confusing definition of LinkEventDefinition's fields "sources" and "target"

  • Key: BPMN21-432
  • Status: open  
  • Source: signavio.com ( Philipp Maschke)
  • Summary:

    We recently had a dispute with a customer, who wanted to use a different BPMN tool for downstream processing of certain process models exported from our tool.
    While analysing their claim, I found confusing definitions for the LinkEventDefinition:

    The textual specification for the LinkEventDefinition (and especially the table 10.98) defines three additional fields (compared to the EventDefinition): name, sources and target. All three are listed in the table 10.98 as "attributes":

    However, the following XSD definition actually specifies only the name to be an XML attribute while target and sources are defined as XML child elements - see table 10.115.

    As far as I could tell from a quick scan, all other "attributes" listed in tables with such a name are actually also XML attributes.
    So I can see how there could an interpretation, that the target of a link event should be an XML attribute and not a child element.
    Am I correct in assuming that the XSD is binding and thus "target" should really not be an attribute of the linkEventDefinition element, but rather a child element?
    If so, then this section should be defined in a less ambiguous way.

  • Reported: BPMN 2.0.2 — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 15:35 GMT
  • Updated: Tue, 22 Sep 2020 19:24 GMT