Search results matching tag 'Workflow'

How to integrate Workflow with a web application?

yashgt — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Hi,

The web application we are building involves complex workflows. One sample WF would be something like :
An Event Coordinator creates an Event. He or a Sales user adds Schedules to the Event. Users register for the Schedules or unregister from registered Schedules. The Coordinator updates the Event details. The Coordinator adds Meetings to the Schedules to link multiple Users together for a meeting. Users receive emails for the meetings. Users accept/reject invitations.

As you can see, if Event management is a workflow, each step in it is a use case that involves multiple Entities. Each operation has to be done from a screen in a web application. The flow may not be sequential. For e.g. a User may work with one Schedule and switch to another Schedule or perhaps navigate to the page where he modifies his profile.

Is there a modelling tool/ design pattern to capture a process as above and link it to as ASP .NET application so that the relevant hyperlinks are displayed to the user and when the user navigates to an hyperlink, the detail of the entity is displayed?

Regards,
Yash

Re: Using WF with ASP.NET

jlane — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT

SharePoint is pretty good at handling processes like this. It fully supports workflow hosting/persistence and allows a certain level of *easy* customization.

If you have InfoPath 2007 you could create a custom form template (or use one from Office Online). Then you just publish it to a form library as a content type so that when users visit the library and click "New" they will be filling out your form. It is really simple to do this once you look at a few examples online. You can also promote the form fields as properties so that they appear as columns in the library, which would allow you to create views on the library for basic reporting (such as what patches/upgrades were applied to which server). Showing the form values as columns is really the main reason that I recommend using InfoPath instead of just a Word doc/template, plus it makes maintaining the form easier and prevents the layout from changing too much.

Then you can use SharePoint designer to create your workflow on the library to assign tasks to users depending on which server it is or whatever.

Each form will have a unique workflow instance that allows you to track who is assigned to what, which tasks are completed, etc. You can also explicitly force the workflow to log various events at different stages when you design it.

Things can get hairy in your situation if you want to submit multiple changes in one form. For example, requesting 3 patches for a server on a single form. In this case you will probably have to also track these in a separate SharePoint list. In order to handle this during the form's submission you will most likely have to write some code behind the InfoPath form and get administrator approval in order to publish it to the library.

Security is always an issue so be sure to limit what particular users/groups can see in the library, what they would be authorized to modify, etc.

If you are coming from a mostly ASP.NET background, a stand-alone solution will involve less learning, less trial and error, and more customization. SharePoint is a beast and MS has done a lot of the work for you and it is great for simple document management, but to me it leaves a lot to be desired when you really need to fine-tune processes like this for reporting purposes.

Hope you got some ideas from this.

State Machine Question

jjaramillo — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Hi guys.

Can a state machine state be State Machine?

If you can redirect me to a resource I'll be very gratefull.

Cheers

Re: What are the negative sides of WF

mahmud05 — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Basically I have not started the workflow architectural design yet. I will do that soon. but before that I wanted to know if there is any known issue that I should consider during architecture specification. Thanks guys for your answers and useful links. Please continue your feedbacks on what are the checkpoints, alerts and worries I need to consider during the archtectural design and also during development.

I heard from few of my peers that WF kills performance and it is not wise to use it. That is why I have come to you guys to have discussion on this.

Thanks

Mahmud

MVC and Windows Workflow Foundation WWF

phenryll — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Hi folks,

I recently came across the Web Portal 2.0 called DropThings (http://www.codeplex.com/dropthings), which is fully AJAX oriented and used WWF as the business layer.

WWF deserves to be taken into account and ease the implementation of many aspects of business logic.

Are there MVC projects that use WWF in any way? You guys, do you use WWF in conjunction with MVC? What are the pros and cons?

Thanks

SharePoint Links and Query Strings with Spaces in them

lday — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Hi,

I have got a couple of SharePoint Designer Workflows workflows in place that have links in them. However these links are dynamic and are partly made up by values pulled from the item (i.e. a filename).

The problem i have is the links miss out the first space in a value that is pulled in from SharePoint, for example if i put the value Customer ABC Limited into the link, it would become CustomerABC Limited and therefore cause the link to be incorrect as the space between Customer and ABC has been removed.

Can anyone help me work out how to correct this?

Many Thanks in advance

Resume a workflow Instance, from the point stoped.

surya.veerla — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:00:00 GMT

For example:
I have a workflow with :
Activity1
Activity2
Activity3
And the workflow was suspended on Activity2. I want to resume the workflow from Activity2 and depends on the circumstances.

Lets say I am downloading file from ftp location using download activity during downloading some one stoped the workflow service, that time system is not throwing any error but status still says that Running and this status will be for ever. But it will fail to do intended activity which is file download when we restart the services.

Attributes stripped from web.config during replacement

aconyers — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:00:00 GMT

I have a WCF service published in my web application that is impimented by a WF workflow. When I use web.config replacement on this config section the connectionString, LoadIntervalSeconds and UnloadOnIdle attributes are stripped from the add element:

1    <behaviors>
2        <serviceBehaviors>
3        <behavior name="Transfer.ServiceBehavior">
4            <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
5            <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" />
6            <workflowRuntime validateOnCreate="true">
7            <services>
8                <add type="System.Workflow.Runtime.Hosting.SqlWorkflowPersistenceService, System.Workflow.Runtime, Version=3.0.00000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionString="My Connection String" LoadIntervalSeconds="2700" UnLoadOnIdle="true" />
9            </services>
10           </workflowRuntime>
11       </behavior>
12       </serviceBehaviors>
13   </behaviors>
14

Any suggestions?

Thanks

-AC

Can we develop a IDE for develop workflow

warangal — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Can we develop a IDE for develop workflow

if user want to design his own workflow, how we develop a interface for user , it s possible to provide a toolbox for user and components for him to design workflow.

Re: New-Mailbox Issues

loxschpen — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Well I have good news and bad news for you.

First the bad: the fact of it all is that you CANNOT run the Exchange Management Shell from ANY ASP>NET application. Why is this you ask? Well our friends over at Microsoft have taken the ability to impersonate out of their new environment. I know I am in the same boat as you as I automated 3 companies with wonderful web services for Exchange 2000 and 2003 using CDOEXM....

SO what is the good new? Well its this, you can run your scripts under a NON impersonated account. So what I did was create a new service account for Exchange 2007 and then tested to made sure it worked. Now that I had that account I created a new WCF Workflow library in VS2008. Once I did that I was able to install it in IIS 7 and run the WF as my new service account.

We can now get to work by taking an interface application via the web into our new WCF Workflow. Not only does the workflow make things nice and easy on programming, but custom error handling and even rollbacks are done for me. Now if something fails, I notify the user via an AJAX panel of the status of the job and dont let them submit the same one again until the issiues are fixed. This allowed me to teach the WF all about how to solve certain error codes making my applications moron proof.

I am writing an article for the Code Project and DevX on it and I will have it posted out soon. Let me know if this helps you or what other direction you have gone down.

Regards,

Timothy