Setting Visual Properties and Using Your Own Library of Images

ActiveBPEL® Designer User’s Guide

Setting Visual Properties and Using Your Own Library of Images

For all of ActiveBPEL’s activity icons, you can change the font size, colors, borders, and other visual properties. In addition, you can change the activity icons to impart more meaningful visual representation for the type of process you are building.

You can set defaults for all processes, as described in Layout Preferences, or you can modify visual properties for individual processes and activities.

Here are some examples.

Example 1: Add a border, change font size for an activity.

Example of activity with border and font change

Example 2: Select your own images for activities by setting the Image Location property for each activity.

Example of activities with custom images

Example 3: Change the link style from process default (Manhattan) to Manual. The manual style draws a straight link, rather than a stair-step style link, and allows you to set the angle for a link transition. A Shortest Path style link travels around the border of objects to link two activities.

Example of manual style for a link

The following table lists the visual properties you can set for an activity.


Property	Description
Basic Properties
Border	Yes/No selection to display a border on a drawing item
Border Color	Opens a dialog for you to choose a basic or custom color for the border of a drawing item
Custom Label	Text you type in to display instead of activity type or name
Image Location	File system location and name of the image file. See the Tips section below for multi-selecting activities to change their images.
Size to Fit	Set to Yes to restrict resizing of the selected drawing object. Select No to permit resizing of the drawing object.
Label	Select the display format for an activity label. See Selecting Activity Labels.
Label Alignment	Align text (left, right, center, top, bottom)
Label Placement	Placement of text label relative to image
Advanced Properties
Orientation	For a container, set the vertical or horizontal orientation for activities within the sequence
Primary Alignment	For a Sequence activity, sets the alignment for the group of activities
Secondary Alignment	For a Sequence activity, set the alignment position of the activities within the sequence.
Background Color	Fill color, if the Transparent property is No
Expanded	For a container, such as a Scope, a Yes/No display indicating whether the container’s contents are displayed or hidden. This setting changes when you select Expand or Collapse from the container’s right-mouse menu.
Font	Font to use for label
Font Color	Color for labels
Image Display	The image to draw if any
Image Text Gap	Select the size for the gap between an activity icon and the label
Location	The XY location on the canvas of the object
Size	The current size on canvas
Transparent	Yes/No setting. If you select No, you can set the Background color
Transparency Level	For drawing objects, set the value of transparency. A larger value decreases the tranparency.

Tips for setting visual properties:

Set default values in a visual properties file. For details, see Layout Preferences.
For a particular process, to change the image for a group of activities, multi-select the activities and then select the Image Location. For example, select all Receives to change the icon for that activity type.
To resize a container activity, such as a Sequence, set the Size to Fit option to No
To preserve all visual properties when you copy a BPEL file to a new location, see Preserving BPEL Layout With VBPEL Files.