Camunda 7 replacement for metastorm features

Hi Team,
I am trying to convert a business flow which is already modelled in Metastorm Platform, to Camunda 7. I am a bit confused with certain components in Metastorm and what are the BPMN alternates for them in Camunda 7. Can you kindly suggest Camunda 7 alternates for the following Metastorm components:

  1. Common Stage: Common stages are used in cases where the same sequence of steps occurs at several points in the business process. We can link a common stage to multiple stages and avoid duplication of these steps in the linked stages.

  2. Flag action: It is invoked when the engine is informed that a particular task has occurred. These are used to send messages between processes/ external applications

I am new to BPMN, could you please help
Thanks in advance.

Hi @Pushkala,

  1. A common stage seems like a reusable process (part of a process). BPMN has call activities. A call activity links to another process model. When an instance reaches a call activity, the linked process is invoked. The instance only continues once the called process completes. You can read more about call activitites here.
  2. In BPMN, interactions between processes and external applications is usually modeled explicitly - you can use a send task or a service task.
    Alternatively, Camunda 7 enables you to attach TaskListeners and ExecutionListeners to your process application.

If you are new to BPMN, the on-demand BPMN course in the Camunda Academy may be for you.

Hi @StephanHaarmann
Thank you very much for the response.
I have a small confusion that can Call activity can be used to link activities within a single process model?
It is defined as ’ call activity references a process that is external to the process definition, and the main use case for the call activity is to have a reusable process definition that can be called from multiple other process definitions’
My use case is to group some commonly occurring steps in different tasks to a single stage and then link this stage to related user tasks. This is happening inside a single process definition. So can I use Call activity here?
Thanks in advance

In BPMN a task is atomic — you cannot divide it further into steps.
Let me illustrate call activities with an example.

A company offers products and services. The company has to order-to-pay processes respectively. However, both invoke the same invoice process. They can do this via a call activity that links the invoice process.

Based on your response, I’ve the feeling that I did not understand common stages fully. Let me summarize what I understood:
You have multiple user tasks in a sequence.
You can mark these tasks as a common stage.
At other places you can add a task, link it to the common stage, and henceforth it acts as a placeholder for the sequence of user tasks defined before.

Is that right? Then I think call activities may still be your best option; however, you cannot link the call activity to a sequence of tasks in the same process. These tasks need to be externalized into a separate process.

Thanks again @StephanHaarmann.
But as you mentioned in the last section, we cannot link the call activity to a sequence of tasks in the same process. These tasks need to be externalized into a separate process. I think here is where I am stuck and I am trying to find a bpmn alternate for the same.

I believe there is no 1-to-1 mapping of common stages to BPMN.

Hi @Pushkala,

it may be a workround to use pools and model the stage in same diagram:

The process engine will create new process instances for each stage.

Hope this helps, Ingo

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@Ingo_Richtsmeier Thank you for your time. I will take a look into this