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Overview

@bpmnkit/ascii converts BPMN 2.0 diagrams into Unicode box-drawing text art. It uses the same Sugiyama layout engine as the visual renderer, so the spatial flow of the diagram is preserved.

Useful for: CLI output, plain-text documentation, terminal UIs, test snapshots, and LLM prompts where visual BPMN isn't available.

Features

• Unicode box-drawing — ┌─┐, │, └─┘, → for clean terminal output
• Automatic layout — uses @bpmnkit/core's layout engine
• All element types — tasks, events, gateways, sub-processes
• Configurable output — optional title, element type labels
• Zero additional dependencies — only requires @bpmnkit/core (already bundled)

Installation

npm install @bpmnkit/ascii

Quick Start

import { renderBpmnAscii } from "@bpmnkit/ascii"
import { readFileSync } from "node:fs"

const xml = readFileSync("my-process.bpmn", "utf8")
const art = renderBpmnAscii(xml, { title: true, showTypes: true })
console.log(art)

Example output

Order Flow
══════════════════════════════════════════════
  ╭──────────╮     ╭───────────────╮     ╭╮
  │  Order   │────▶│ Validate Order│────▶││
  │ Received │     │ (ServiceTask) │     │◇│
  ╰──────────╯     ╰───────────────╯     ╰╯
                                          │
                         ╭───────────────╯│╰───────────────╮
                         ▼                                  ▼
                   ╭───────────╮                    ╭──────────────╮
                   │  Fulfill  │                    │    Reject    │
                   │   Order   │                    │    Order     │
                   ╰───────────╯                    ╰──────────────╯

API Reference

function renderBpmnAscii(xml: string, options?: RenderOptions): string

interface RenderOptions {
  title?: boolean     // Show process name as header. Default: false
  showTypes?: boolean // Include element type in boxes. Default: false
}

Related Packages

| Package | Description | |---------|-------------| | @bpmnkit/core | BPMN/DMN/Form parser, builder, layout engine | | @bpmnkit/canvas | Zero-dependency SVG BPMN viewer | | @bpmnkit/editor | Full-featured interactive BPMN editor | | @bpmnkit/engine | Lightweight BPMN process execution engine | | @bpmnkit/feel | FEEL expression language parser & evaluator | | @bpmnkit/plugins | 22 composable canvas plugins | | @bpmnkit/api | Camunda 8 REST API TypeScript client | | @bpmnkit/ui | Shared design tokens and UI components | | @bpmnkit/profiles | Shared auth, profile storage, and client factories for CLI & proxy | | @bpmnkit/operate | Monitoring & operations frontend for Camunda clusters | | @bpmnkit/connector-gen | Generate connector templates from OpenAPI specs | | @bpmnkit/cli | Camunda 8 command-line interface (casen) | | @bpmnkit/proxy | Local AI bridge and Camunda API proxy server | | @bpmnkit/cli-sdk | Plugin authoring SDK for the casen CLI | | @bpmnkit/create-casen-plugin | Scaffold a new casen CLI plugin in seconds | | @bpmnkit/casen-report | HTML reports from Camunda 8 incident and SLA data | | @bpmnkit/casen-worker-http | Example HTTP worker plugin — completes jobs with live JSONPlaceholder API data | | @bpmnkit/casen-worker-ai | AI task worker — classify, summarize, extract, and decide using Claude |

License

MIT © BPMN Kit — made by u11g