Collaborate on a diagram

Edit the same Bonita Process Designer diagram together with teammates in real time, with live cursors and presence.

This recipe walks you and your teammates through co-editing one diagram at the same time. The key requirement is that everyone belongs to the same group as the diagram, because diagram access in Bonita Process Designer is scoped to groups.

Before you start

  • Everyone who needs to edit must have an account with the Creator or Admin role. A Reader can open the diagram and follow along, but cannot make changes.

  • The diagram must belong to a group, and every participant must be a member of that group. Non-members cannot see or open the diagram at all.

For the full role matrix, see Collaborate in real time.

Steps

  1. Confirm group membership. An Admin adds each teammate to the group that owns the diagram. A non-member is completely isolated from the diagram, so this step must come first.

    See Manage groups for how to create groups and add members.

  2. Open the same diagram. Each participant signs in and opens the diagram from the home dashboard, or uses the shared diagram URL. Everyone lands on the same canvas.

  3. See who else is here. When more than one person has the diagram open, you see each participant’s presence and their live cursor moving on the canvas, each in a distinct colour. This tells you in real time where your teammates are working.

  4. Edit together. Add, move, resize and connect elements as usual. Every change is broadcast to the other participants and appears on their canvas within moments — no manual refresh is needed.

  5. Save when you reach a milestone. The server stores the shared diagram a few seconds after the last change, so nobody has to save for the others to see the work. Save (or Ctrl+S) makes the server store it immediately and refreshes its preview on the Home page; while you are connected, it never overwrites your teammates' changes with your copy.

How conflicts are handled

The server is the authoritative store for the diagram. When two people change the same element at nearly the same moment, the last change wins, and that result is shown to everyone. To avoid surprises, work on different parts of the diagram so that two people are not reshaping the same element at once.

An advisory lock indicator can show that someone is actively editing, but it does not stop concurrent editing; it is a courtesy signal, not a hard lock.

When one of you uses AI

While a teammate generates or modifies the diagram with AI, everyone else is paused: the editor shows AI is editing this diagram for <name> — editing is paused until it finishes., and nobody else can change the diagram until the request is over. Wait for the banner to disappear, then check the diagram — it now holds the AI result — before you carry on. Analyzing the diagram with AI does not pause anyone. See While AI is editing the diagram.

If you lose connection

If your network drops, the editor reconnects automatically and your canvas is replaced by the current diagram held by the server. Any changes made by others while you were offline appear once you are back. Changes you made while disconnected disappear from your canvas if the diagram was still open anywhere: a teammate, a Reader, another tab of yours, or your own connection that has not timed out yet. If a save succeeded while you were disconnected, the Versions tab normally holds an Auto version saved by you at that time, with those changes: download it or restore it (see Restore a version). So do not keep editing while disconnected: export the diagram as JSON first if you need to keep a copy of your changes, then wait for the connection to come back and reload the page.

If the editor shows Live collaboration stopped after repeated connection failures. Reload the page to resume., reload the page. Reload it too after a Wi-Fi drop or when your computer wakes from sleep: a connection that died silently can still look connected. See When the connection drops.

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