Consequences of moving steps yourself

Engage Process Modeler calculates itself the positions of the process step icons in the diagram. Icons are always placed in a grid, at most one per cell, so they are sorted out in columns and rows. All the other components like labels, input/output balloons and arrows are always drawn relatively to their step icon. So, if you decide to change the position of the step name and move it to the middle of the icon then it will be always shown in the middle of this icon wherever the icon is placed.

An automatic arrangement is calculated always for all steps in the diagram and it depends only on the set of the steps and the parent-child relation between them. If you rearrange at least one step of the diagram yourself the automatic arrangement is not calculated anymore because it would destroy your rearrangement. Instead, when you insert or delete a step  Engage Process Modeler tries to create a space or fill the gap by moving some steps around the place involved. This is done by a heuristic, context depended algorithm and can give sometimes unexpected results.

Consider a simple example of the user modified arrangement (the step 5 was moved one cell to the right) :

Now we will insert aTelephone step in front of the Stop step 7.

Notice that the branch with a Telephone must be placed one row below and this creates a free cell in front of step 6 where the branch with Computer can fit.  So this branch is moved up because the heuristic algorithm tries to fill gaps. However, if we now delete the Telephone step the heuristic algorithm cannot move its branch up because the former place is occupied. Thus, inserting and then deleting the same step does not necessarily lead to the same result. You have to undo the insert operation to really go back to the initial situation.

The fact that not automatic arrangement is used has also an impact on the Input/Output show/hide functionality. If you press the Input/Output button in the Show/hide group on the Layout tab the automatic arrangement will spread vertically the diagram adding half of the row on top and one extra row between each two rows of the diagram to make place for the input/output balloons.

If positions of steps where changed by the user the diagram is not spread anymore, only half of a row is added on top. There is now the responsibility of the user to rearrange the steps in such a way that the input/output balloons nicely fit.

Notice that now the input to Computer is above the output from Telephone! In order to fix this the user has to move the lower branch down himself.