Skip to content

BPMN import coverage — what is refused, and what to do instead

The importer maps the executable element set — the "In scope" list of conformance.md, enumerated by family in Interchange converters. What that guide's refusal outcome does not list is the constructs behind it, and the two questions a refused file raises: is the refusal waiting on something, and what do I do today.

Every refused construct is one of two kinds (ADR-024 §2.16):

  • Capability-blocked — legal BPMN the engine could execute, refused because pkg/model lacks a capability. The refusal names the capability and the issue tracking it; the same file imports unchanged once that lands. Until then the alternative is to build that piece in Go.
  • Standing — the engine will not accept it, and not for want of work: the constructor takes a Go value no document can carry, or the project has decided against the mechanism. The refusal says what to do instead and never says "yet".

The unit is the construct, not the tag: a <transaction> imports whole, and what its method names is judged at registration, not at import — see the note under the standing table.

Capability-blocked

Tracked one issue per row under the import epic #335. A row leaves this table when its capability lands.

Construct Why it is refused Do this instead today Tracking
a <property> as a data-association end the model's Property has no Associate* use a <dataObject> for data that flows between nodes #331

Standing

Not defects; do not file them.

Construct Why the engine will not take it Do this instead
<complexGateway> BPMN activates it by an activationCondition expression; the engine by per-incoming-flow token counts. Recovering counts from an arbitrary Boolean is not mechanical, and guessing changes when the gateway fires build it programmatically with WithActivationThreshold or the activation triples
<adHocSubProcess> entered by a host-supplied adhoc.Router — a Go value deciding which activities run and in what order (ADR-035 §2.1); a file carries only a completion condition build it programmatically with activities.WithAdHoc
a second <inputSet> / <outputSet> per direction the engine models one set per direction one set; several flavours of I/O are several tasks
a collection <itemDefinition> whose structureRef does not resolve the element type comes from an external XSD/WSDL the converter neither has nor fetches; a collection of an unknown type is a shape, not a value — the item imports as a single empty record and the loss is reported build the collection's item in Go if it matters
the Choreography and Conversation families separate conformance classes: a Choreography is not a Process, and dropping one silently would import a different diagram than the one drawn model the process each participant runs

Not a refusal at all: a transaction's method and protocol. Both import verbatim onto the model (Transaction().Method() / .Protocol()); compensate, ##Compensate and the absent attribute all mean the built-in coordinator, and any other value — store, image, a URI — is carried and then refused by RegisterProcess as no transaction coordinator is registered for this method, the same moment a script format nothing claims is (ADR-028 §2.7). Model the undo as compensation handlers.

Reading a refusal

A refused element yields a *convert.UnsupportedElementError naming the tag, its id and the spec section, with the note above as its Planned text; a refused attribute or association yields an error whose message carries the same content. What is consumed rather than refused — a <messageFlow>, a dialect attribute, a dropped protocol — lands in ImportDocument's Dropped report instead, and the file survives. The wording is deliberate and tested (pkg/convert/bpmn/refusalwording_test.go): a capability-blocked refusal names its capability, a standing one names the programmatic route, and neither reads like the other.

See also