Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog

How to Create a SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflow with App Step (extension from the example workflow used for SPC 2012)

spdblog — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 09:18:46 GMT

Hi, I’m JongHwa Lim, a Program Manager at SharePoint Designer team.
Today, I will show you a sample workflow which was demoed at SharePoint Conference 2012 (aka. SPC 2012). In addition to it, I will modify and extend it to make it more realistic in this blog post. This blog article contains some tips you can use when creating a workflow with SharePoint Designer 2013 (aka. SPD 2013). In explaining the detail, I will assume that you are familiar with the SharePoint Designer 2013 and SharePoint 2013 type workflow. If you are not, please read the previous blog articles to learn about SharePoint 2013 workflows.

A workflow for a leisure event company

Let’s assume there is a leisure company named Contoso Leisure and it provides leisure lessons such as horseback riding, fishing, clay shooting, paragliding, and skydiving.

And let’s assume we need an approval workflow which does the following.

Request approval from the Event Coordinator SharePoint Group
If rejected, send rejection mail to the customer
If approved, wait until 5 days before the event/lesson and then send reminder mail for the event
- Reminder mail contains information on the event such as weather information and a map with driving direction

In this workflow example, we will use two web services but only one web service will be handled by ‘call HTTP Web Service’ action available in SPD. The other web service will be referenced inside of a String variable and put into the mail body with an <IMG> tag. For more information, you can reference the Bing Map API page. (http://www.microsoft.com/maps/developers/web.aspx)

If you create the workflow yourself, the following workflow will be created.

Please notice that the ‘Get Weather Info’ stage has a ‘Call HTTP Web Service’ action and if you click the first parameter, you will see the following URL is used, where the web service key is stored in a separate list named ‘Web Service Keys’. I will defer the explanation and usage of the Web Service action, Get Item from Dictionary action and Loop container to a previous blog post by HyongGuk Kim.(http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2012/09/05/how-to-work-with-web-service-using-call-http-web-service-action.aspx)

And if you click the ‘Set Workflow Variable’ action in the ‘Send Reminder Email’ stage, you will find it also uses the ‘Web Service Keys’ list to store the web service key or token.

Let’s make this more realistic

In a real life situation, the web service keys may need to be managed securely. To do that, we need to secure them by storing them in a list which is accessible only by people with Full Control privilege. But in this case, the normal workflow logic would fail to access the web service keys as it is run under the permission of workflow initiator and (logical AND) that of Workflow App. So if the workflow initiator does not have permission to access the list that contains the web service keys, the workflow will fail. To make the workflow logic run under only the Workflow App permission which is Read/Write to all site lists, we need to use an App Step.

Step 1. Make the list secure by having independent permission

As explained, we need to make the list containing the web service keys accessible only by Full Control users. To do that, you need to stop inheritance and remove unnecessary users from the list.

Let’s say the list is ‘Web Service Keys’ list. If you go to the List Settings and Permission for this list page, you can find the menu to stop inheritance.

After breaking inheritance, you can choose non-Full Control users as below and click Remove User Permissions button.

Then, the list will only have Full Control users.

Step 2. Activate the App Step feature

To use App Steps, you need to activate the Workflows can use app permissions site feature in Site settings->Manage site features as below.

Then, the App Step button in SPD will be enabled.

Step 3. Add App Step and move the logic into it

You need to find the pieces of logics which reference the ‘Web Service Keys’ list and then enclose them inside an App Step container. We have two pieces of logics we need to place inside of an App Step – Call HTTP web service action and Set RouteMap variable action, which is illustrated in the figures below:

Step 4. Publish your workflow

When you publish your workflow, the following dialog will show up to explain the behavior.

I hope you enjoyed this article and you learned about how to use App Steps appropriately. See you in the next article.

SharePoint Conference 2012 in Vegas!

spdblog — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 03:34:32 GMT

Hi all,

Sam Chung from the SharePoint Designer team again. Just wanted to quickly remind everyone that the SharePoint 2012 Conference is happening next week in Las Vegas!

This is a great opportunity for the entire SharePoint Community! You’ll get to see and hear some great presentations on everything SharePoint!

Another great plus is that there is going to be three of us from the SharePoint Designer team doing presentations! Hyong Guk Kim, JongHwa Lim, and myself will be there. For those of you who are going, look for us in the following sessions:

Developing SharePoint Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visio Pro 2013

Presented by JongHwa Lim and Sam Chung

Creating Custom Workflow Activities and Actions for SharePoint 2013

Presented by Hyong Guk Kim

What's New in Designing Workflows and Managing Work Requests With Project Online & Project Server 2013

Presented by Kia Amiri and Sam Chung

Looking forward to seeing a lot of you there in Vegas!

Thanks,

Sam

SharePoint Designer 2013 RTM Now Available!

spdblog — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 02:17:59 GMT

Hello all,

Sam Chung from the PM team in SPD here. I’m happy to announce today that SharePoint Designer 2013 is now available for download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35491

You’ve been seeing a lot of the new features we’ve announced so far in this blog and others. Well now is the chance to download the new SPD and try it out yourself!

Thanks,

Sam

Introducing the new Visual Designer

spdblog — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 05:32:27 GMT

Introductions:

Hello all, my name is Sam Chung and I am a Program Manager for SharePoint Designer. I’m very proud to introduce everyone to one of our biggest investment for SharePoint Designer 2013, which is the Visual Designer.

Before we begin, I highly recommend you take a look at the MSDN articles we have setup. You can find the relevant articles here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj163272(v=office.15).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj164055(v=office.15).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj163971(v=office.15).aspx

The Visual Designer is a whole new workflow design surface that’s built right into SharePoint Designer 2013. For those of you who are familiar with SPD 2010, you’ll know that you could create SP 2010 workflows in Visio first, export it, and then import these diagrams into SPD 2010. And although, this did work, there were several limitations:

No way to parameterize the different actions within Visio.

You would always have to switch to the Text-Based Designer to set the action parameters.

When exporting from SPD, you had no idea how your diagram might have been changed
No way to show/use custom actions within Visio

All of these limitations are now gone, and we’ve added a bunch of new features to really make this feature shine.

How does it work?

Let’s go now and take a look at what the Visual Designer looks like. Here’s a screen shot of the actual designer:

As you can see, the Visual Designer looks like a Visio canvas showing up directly within SharePoint Designer. And in fact, this is exactly what’s going on. When SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visio 2013 Professional are installed side by side on the same machine, we will enable the new Visual Designer.

If we take a look at the screen, you can see the two different apps:

Although there are two separate apps running, we’ve integrated the two together so much, that you shouldn’t even notice that there are two separate apps. Everything should feel like it’s all happening within SPD.

How do I enable the Visual Designer?

Here are the prerequisites for using the Visual Designer

Install SharePoint Designer 2013 & Visio Professional on the same machine

The Visual Designer will not work in any previous versions of SPD
Only Visio Pro will enable the Visual Designer

Connect SharePoint Designer 2013 up to a SharePoint 2013 site that has the Workflow Manager setup

The Visual Designer will not work on 2010 sites
This is because you can’t create SharePoint 2013 workflows on SharePoint 2010 sites
You can find more info on how to setup the Workflow Manager here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj163276(v=office.15)

Create a new SharePoint 2013 workflow

The Visual Designer will only work when creating / editing SharePoint 2013 workflows
You cannot use this feature to create / edit SharePoint 2010 workflows

Once you are certain you have all of the prerequisites you should be able to switch to the Visual Designer
at any time by clicking on the “Views” button found in the ribbon:

So what are the key take aways?

1) Able to create workflows using click and drag just like in Visio

All of your actions are made available in the left stencil pane
The Stencil pane automatically displays only the list of actions that are appropriate for the type of workflow you are creating.
Custom actions will also appear in the stencil
The pane is presorted in alphabetical order

2) Able to use “Action Tags” to set properties of different actions

The action tag shows you the “top level” properties of an action. If you look at the same action in the Text-Based Designer, you’ll notice that some properties are shown as links in the sentence:

These same links are shows as the options in the action tag.
Selecting on any one of these options will bring up either the appropriate dialog for that option or the “Top Level Property grid” (more on this directly below)

3) Top Level Property grids allow you to set the properties that would only show up at the sentence
level in the Text-Based Designer.

Similar concept to the action tags

4) You can generate Stage Level Diagrams to view the workflow at just the stage level. This is great for understanding the flow of the workflow or reporting.

Note: The stage level diagram and the original diagram are two distinct diagrams. There is no syncing between the two.
I will create a another blog post purely on the stage level view and it’s capabilities

5) Errors in the workflow are shown the Issues Pane:

Notice how errors are listed in the error pane
Both errors at the shape level and errors in the workflow property are shown here
When you click on an error message, the associated shape is automatically highlighted
Error checking is done whenever you try and Publish a workflow, click on the “Check for Errors” ribbon button, and when try and switch from the Visual Designer to the Text-Based Designer

No error checking is done when you just save workflows

6) Conditional branches need to be set by right clicking on them

Remember that all branches coming out from Conditional shapes need to be set by right clicking on each branch and selecting “Yes” or “No”

There are lots of different features within the Visual Designer which I haven’t gone over. I’ll be covering those features in future posts. For now, feel free to post any questions you may have.

Thanks,

Sam

How to create a Quick Step and Custom Action to start SharePoint 2013 workflow

spdblog — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 03:14:04 GMT

Hi, this is JongHwa Lim from the SharePoint Design team.

Today, I will share with you a feature for creating a Ribbon button on a SharePoint server UI. This button will start a SharePoint 2013 workflow when pressed. As a matter of fact, you can achieve this by two different features which actually share many things in common – they are Quick Steps and Custom Actions. I will go with Quick Steps first which provides a more tailored user experience for this goal and then explain Custom Actions briefly.

If you are already used to Custom Actions or Quick Steps to start SharePoint 2010 workflow, then you can just try to create one to start a SharePoint 2013 workflow. Since the UX is, basically, the same, it should be easy for users who have done this before.

Quick Steps

I will explain in detail how you can create a Quick Step to start a SharePoint 2013 workflow.

Preparation

Creating a Quick Step requires some prerequisites.

First, you need to prepare a Ribbon icon file to show up in the Ribbon for the Quick Step you will define in the following steps. I decided to use the Site Assets document library and uploaded an image file there.

Second, you must have a list or document library you want to create the Quick Step in. In this example, I will use a Vacation Request list and create a quick step which starts a workflow to request an approval for the vacation.

Create a Quick Step

Now that you have the list to use, it is time to create a Quick Step. It is very easy. Just click the New Quick Step button under Customize List group in LIST Ribbon tab as highlighted below.

If you used a document library, you can find it under Customize Library group in the LIBRARY Ribbon tab as below.

Clicking the button will lead you to this dialog where you just need to choose Allow.

SPD is then launched with the Vacation Request list shown with the following dialog popped up.

Take some time to explore the UIs on this dialog. You will find that you can create a new workflow based on SharePoint 2013 Workflow or SharePoint 2010 Workflow, or use some existing workflows. You will also notice that you can define the button label and button image. As we will create a new workflow based on SharePoint 2013 Workflow, choose the Start a new workflow option and then choose SharePoint 2013 Workflow as the Platform Type. Type in ‘Vacation Approval’ for the Button Label field. Lastly, click the Browse button to locate the icon image we uploaded in the Preparation section. Your dialog should look like below:

[SC(1]

Once you click OK, a workflow designer for SharePoint 2013 Workflow will be presented as below. Feel free to complete the workflow logic. In this example, as mentioned before, we will create a Vacation Approval workflow.

Once you publish your workflow, you’ve finished creating a new Quick Step. If you go to the ITEMS Ribbon tab, you will find a new Ribbon group Quick Steps is created and a new Ribbon menu Vacation Approval is created as well.

And if you go to the list summary page for the Vacation Request list in SPD, you will find that a workflow named ‘Button – Vacation Approval’ is present and a Custom Action named ‘Vacation Approval’ is created. As a matter of fact, Quick Step is a specific kind of Custom Actions. So if you are familiar with the Custom Actions’ features, you can apply them to your Quick Steps as well.

Modify Quick Step (Advanced)

As Quick Step is a mixture of Custom Action (‘View Ribbon’ type Custom Actions) and a list workflow, you can apply some Custom Action features to modify the created Quick Step. If you click ‘Vacation Approval’ in the Custom Actions slab, the following dialog will be presented.

You can change the name of the button and even update the Quick Step to do a different job such as navigation to some forms or web pages, or starting a different workflow.

And if you scroll down a bit, you can find some advanced settings. If you use the Ribbon Location field and Sequence number field, you can change the location of the Ribbon button.

Let’s say, we want the button to show up in Workflows group rather than in Quick Steps group and want it to show up last in the group. Then you can easily achieve this by modifying the values to followings:

This will make the button show on the targeted location as below.

If you want to know more about the values available in the Ribbon Location, please refer to following article or search for some other blog articles explaining Custom Actions.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee537543.aspx

For Rights mask, you can use the values from the below site separated by semicolons to allow only permitted user to see/use the Custom Action.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spbasepermissions.aspx

Custom Actions

Let’s say now, that after you have a new Ribbon menu to start the Vacation Request workflow, you want a similar menu on the List Item Menu so that users can start a workflow by right-clicking over an item, like below:

To do this, you need to create a new Custom Action of type List Item Menu. You can find the Custom Action Ribbon button in the list summary page for the Vacation Request list in SPD. If you click it, you will be presented with the following options. In this example, please choose List Item Menu.

In the dialog that follows, please choose Initiate workflow option and select the ‘Button – Vacation Approval’ workflow which was created during the creation of Quick Step so that two UIs will start the same workflow. And Click OK.

That’s it. You created the menu. If you go to the Vacation Request list, choose one item, and see the list item menu, you can find it.

Known Issue

There are some known issues for the Quick Steps and Custom Actions feature.

After starting the workflow, it goes to the site default page rather than to the list
Following option in workflow summary page is turned off by default for the workflow created from Quick Steps
If you click the New button from the Custom Actions slab, it automatically creates a View Ribbon type Custom Action

Using SharePoint Designer 2013 to Create and Modify Project Workflows

spdblog — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 02:41:42 GMT

Hello everyone!

My name is Sam Chung, and I am a Program Manager for SharePoint Designer. I’d like to introduce everyone to a great new feature we’ve introduced in SharePoint Designer 2013. For those of you who work with Project Server Workflows, you’ll be aware that ALL previous versions of Project Server workflows were only created using Visual Studio. Well, this is no longer the case in Office 2013. The SharePoint Designer team has partnered up with the Project team to create a great seamless integration of the two products.

Now, luckily for me, our partner team Project has already gone ahead and created a blog posting on how you can use SPD for exactly this, and as such, all I have to do is link to their blog.

So without further ado, please point your browsers to the below link and read all about this great new feature.

http://blogs.office.com/b/project/archive/2012/09/18/demand-management-sharepoint-designer-project-server.aspx

Thanks,

Sam

How to use SharePoint Designer 2013's Visual Designer to Move Workflows Between Sites

spdblog — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 08:15:00 GMT

Hello all,

My name is Sam Chung, and I’m a PM here at SharePoint Designer. In this blog we’re going to talk about a great new scenario we’ve fully enabled now with the Import/Export feature found in the Visual Designer.

Introduction:

For many developers, there comes a special time in their lives when a strong need will arise, a need to spread their workflows. In particular, it will be the need to move their workflows between sites. This need can arise for many reasons, with the more common reason being the need to move a workflow between development, staging, and production environments. But whatever the reason may be, I’d like to use this article to help you guys out when trying to move your workflows from one site to another.

Before I begin though, please make sure to read over the following articles:

The first is a general overview of the Visual Designer:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163272%28office.15%29.aspx

You will need to read the above article to understand how the Visual Designer works.

The next is an article on how to package your lists and your workflows using our packaging feature:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2012/08/30/packaging-list-site-and-reusable-workflow-and-how-to-deploy-the-package.aspx

You will need to understand the above article in order to understand how to package whatever lists your workflow may be referencing.

Creating your Workflow

Your workflow can be pretty much any workflow. There is no technical limitation in terms of what you can move. However, please take note of the following points if you want to avoid publishing and run-time issues:

1. Make sure that all objects that are being referenced in your workflow exist in the target site.

a. Read the packaging article to figure out how to package your lists

2. Make sure that all actions that are being used in your source site exist on the target site

a. If you have any custom actions which exist on your source site, you must make sure to bring those over to your target site before you bring over your workflow

3. Moving Project Workflows from a PWA site to a non-PWA site is not possible.

a. SPD will block this during import if it detects a Project workflow being imported into a non-PWA site.

b. We have a lot of extra data in a Project workflow and as such, these should only be moved from a PWA site to another PWA site

For this blog, I’m going to use a fairly simple workflow as an example. I will be enabling an Ideas list for an event scenario. The workflow I am going to create will be a simple workflow that will be used on an “Event Ideas” list. Users will enter in a new list item for every event idea that they have. Once they’ve filled in all of the required information, they will indicate that the item is ready for review. At that point, the workflow will kickoff and ask certain approvers to approve or reject the idea.

The list I’ll be using is this one:

You can see how this list has the following columns:

· Event Idea

o Single Line String

· Location

o Single Line String· Cost

o Currency

· Status

o Choice Field

And the workflow itself looks like this:

Here is what the workflow is doing:

· Log to history that we’re in the first stage

· Check to see if the Status column field is set to “Ready for Review”

o If it’s not, wait until it is set to “Ready for Review”

· Log to history that we’re now assigning tasks to review the idea

· Update the status column to “Under Review”

· Assign tasks out

· If the idea was approved, we’ll come to this stage where we’ll log to the history that the idea was approved

· Set the Status column to “Accepted”

· If the idea was rejected, we’d come to this stage where we’ll log to the history that the idea was rejected

· Set the status column to “Rejected”

Exporting the Workflow

Now that we have our workflow, let’s go ahead and export this guy out. We do this by doing clicking on
the “Export to Visio” ribbon button.

NOTE: Pressing the Export button will automatically save your workflow first to the server and then start the export feature. The reason for this is because we need to ensure the exported workflow is in-sync with the server version at the time of export.

Pressing that button will bring up the following dialog:

Select where you’d like to save the file and press the “Save” button.

This will now have saved your Visio diagram to your selected location. If you so wish, you can open the diagram right away in Visio 2013.

Note: In this example, we exported the workflow from the Visual Designer, but it is possible to export your workflow from the following places:

· Text-Based Designer

· Workflow Settings Page

· Workflow Gallery

But in all of these examples, you must have the Visual Designer enabled. And in order for this to happen you must have Visio 2013 Professional installed on the same machine as SharePoint Designer 2013.

Importing In the Workflow

Now that you have exported your workflow, you can now open up another SharePoint 2013 site in SharePoint Designer 2013 and import in your workflow. Here are the steps you will take:

1. Connect SPD to a new site

2. Click on “Workflows” in the navigation pane

3. Press the bottom half of the “Import from Visio” ribbon button, and select the “Import Visio 2013 Diagram” option

4. This will bring up a regular Open File dialog. Go find your exported diagram and open it.

5. This will bring up the “Create Workflow” dialog

a. Give your workflow a name

b. Give it a description if you want

c. Notice how the Workflow Type is greyed out to “List Workflow”. This is because SPD has detected that the imported workflow is a list workflow. And as such, it has automatically selected the correct workflow type. If you were importing in a fresh new diagram from Visio (A workflow that has never been in SPD), this option would have been enabled.

d. Since this is a List Workflow, the option to select which list to associate the workflow to is enabled. Go ahead and select a list. This option is only enabled for List Workflows. Ideally, you would have exported and imported in your List as well, in which case, you could just select the same list you were working on in the previous site.

e. Press OK

6. This will now bring up your workflow diagram, exactly as you saw it before.

a. All of your workflow logic has been retained

b. All of your action properties have been retained

c. All of your local variables have been retained

7. You can now go ahead and continue editing your workflow. But before you publish, make sure you read the next section.

Post Deployment Work Before Publishing

Once you’ve imported in your workflow from a different site, you cannot go ahead and try to publish it right away. Although this might work without any errors, your workflow will almost surely fail during run-time. Once you’ve imported in your workflow, make sure you do/check the next following steps:

1. Go to your workflow settings page, and update the Task List and History List

a. If you take a look at it now, you’ll see how it says “New Task List” and “New History List”. However, due to a late breaking change, when you publish your workflow, it will not make new Task and History lists. Which will cause your workflow to error out on runtime.

b. There should already be existing Task and History lists you can choose. Go ahead and choose those.

Note: If you really do want to create a new Task or History list, just click on a different list first, and then re-select the New Task List or New History List option. This will then bring up popups that will ask you if you really want to create a new list. And once you’ve confirmed that you want to create new lists, SPD will create these new lists right away.

2. Fix up your Lookups

a. If you did not bring over your lists with your VSDX file, you are most likely associating your workflow to a totally different list. As such, if you were referencing any list items or properties, you might need to fix those up.

b. You can get around this if you package your list from your original site and deploy it to the new site before you import in your workflow. To learn more about packaging your list, see this blog: Packaging List, Site, and Reusable Workflow and How to Deploy the Package

3. Check for any custom actions in your Workflow that don’t exist in your new site

a. If you do have custom actions in your workflow, make sure you deploy those actions onto your new site before you import in this workflow.

4. For Project Workflows: Make sure you’ve brought over your Stages, Phases, PDPs, and Custom Fields before you import in your workflow.

a. Project Workflows require that all of the previous Project Objects have been brought over from the old site to the new site. Take a look at the Project Blogs to find out more about how to move your Project Objects.

Once you have taken care of these issues, you should have no problem publishing and running your workflow on your new site!

Hope this article was of use to you. Feel free to leave comments below.

Thanks,

Sam

How to manipulate the Task Form with SharePoint Designer for new task actions?

spdblog — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 09:16:00 GMT

Hello SharePoint Designer users,

I’m Chong Youn (John) Choe, a PM in the SharePoint Designer team. It makes me very happy to post an article on a new issue.

Background

Approval is one of the key applications of workflow. A couple of actions are provided in SharePoint Designer 2013 to receive participant’s response. In SharePoint Designer 2013, task forms are auto-generated based upon a certain Content Type, so it is worthwhile to learn how to customize the content type for those who are interested in customizing the task form in your workflows.

Example Scenario

Chris Bryant, a designer of Contoso, wants to have feedback on the new product model design he presented last night. Default Start a Task Process action is only suitable for getting an approval or a rejection response from the participants he selects, as such, he decides to modify the task form to better fit into the need of collecting feedback.

Custom Content Type Creation

First, a custom content type needs to be created in the site. It can be done either the SharePoint server side or SharePoint Designer client side.

For the Server side do the following:

1. Go to Site Content Type page

Go to Site Settings, and select Site Content Types in the Web Designer Galleries section. On the Site Content Types page, choose Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) in List Content Types.

Figure 1 Site settings menu

Figure 2 Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013)

2. Create a site content type which inherits the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) content type.

Go back to the Site Content Types page and press the Create link. Set its name, description, and then set its Parent Content Type as the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) content type. Setting the parent content type to the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) content type is a required step in order to use your new custom content type. Choose or introduce a Content Type Group and press OK.

Figure 3 Set Parent Content Type

3. Add the new Content Type to your Tasks list.

Click on Settings, and then click on the back to site home and go to Site Contents option and then click on your Tasks list.

Figure 4 Tasks button

Choose the List tab in the ribbon, and click List Settings. Scroll down to locate the Content Types section, and press the Add from existing site content types option to add the newly created content type.

Figure 5 Content Types session in List Settings

The same work can be done even easier on SharePoint Designer,

1. Go to the Content Types menu under the Site Objects tab in the Navigation pane. All the Content Types in the site will be displayed. Create a site content type by pressing the Content Type button

Figure 6 Content Types menu in SharePoint Designer

2. Choose the name for your new content type and select a sorting group for it. Make sure that the parent content type is the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) content type as depicted in figure 7.

Figure 7 Create a Content Type dialog

3. Next, add the content type into your Tasks list, this is required in order to use it in the Task Actions. Go to your Tasks list under List and Libraries under Site Objects in the Navigation tab again. Afterwards, add the newly created content type into the Tasks list.

Figure 8 Content Types Picker on SharePoint Designer

Without adding the content type in the Tasks list, the following run time error will occur.
Figure 9 Run time error

Using either method to creating your Custom Content Type will make it available in the workflow.

The Outcome option column is the column that will hold all of the possible responses each participant can select. Any custom content type created by the above steps will be shown in the Start a Task Process and Assign a Task actions.

Custom Content Type Modification

When adding a Start a Task Process or Assign a Task action, the new Content Type will be displayed in the Task action’s designer type.

Once it’s confirmed that the Custom Content Type has been created and is usable by the workflow, let’s start working on how to customize the form.

A very simple workflow to collect feedback is depicted in figure 10.

Figure 10 Collect Feedback Workflow

Chris, Contoso’s designer, wants to receive feedback from an internal expert group hence the form should be modified to store comments from each participant.

1) Go to the Site Settings page, and open Site content types in Web Designer Galleries

2) Click on the Custom Content Type under List Content Types

Figure 11 Contoso Content Type

At this point, the task form’s look will be the same as the default task form. Which looks like figure 11.

Many fields in the default form are useless in this scenario. For Chris, the following fields may be modified in the Content type.


Figure 12 Task Form Contoso Content Type

Let’s examine all the fields one by one in figure 11, Contoso Content Type, to decide if they are needed in our task form.

1) Task Name is a Required field

2) Start Date/Due Date may be meaningful but is not something we have to have in our form

3) Assigned To field is not required in the form since the participants will be editing the form assigned to them already

4) % Complete is pointless since the feedback is normally given all at once

5) The Body field will be used to gather the feedback

6) Predecessors is not needed here

7) Priority has nothing to do with feedback

8) Task Status is a basic field that tracks the status

9) Related Items are not needed in this form

10) Task Outcome is a choice of outcomes, in this case a simple “Submit” option is all that’s needed to finish the feedback process.

The column manipulation pages look all alike, an example screenshot is below.

When a field is set to Required, the column needs to be filled in order to close the task form, while Optional columns are displayed but can be left blank. Either taking the Hidden setting or removing the column by the Remove button will hide the column from the task form. For example, in the below screenshot, pressing the Remove button will erase the Assigned To field from the Contoso Content Type.

Figure 13 Change Content Type Column

Chris has gone ahead and modified the Contoso Content Type so that it will be used purely for feedback.

The results are displayed in figure 14. The Related items column is hidden since it cannot be removed.

Figure 14 Contoso Content Type modified

In addition, the Task Outcome site colun is used in the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) Content Type. It is best to remove the Task Outcome column and create a new site column of Outcome choice type by clicking on Add from a new site column.

Figure 15 Task Form Contoso Content Type modified

When each participant receives a task based on the form above, the review can be written in the description field and the task can be completed by pressing the Submit button. Remaining columns such as Start Date could be hidden, too.

After this, it is also okay to rename the fields as Chris wishes. For instance, in order to change the name of the outcome field Submit, choose the Submit column and press Edit column link in the Site Column information. The column name can be renewed there, as depicted in figure 17. Note that the new name for the column can be non-ascii character based such as “テスト”.

Figure 16 Edit Column

Figure 17 Site Column Information

Limitations

SharePoint 2013 workflows with SharePoint Designer 2013 will generate task forms by analyzing the associated Content Type. Please note that InfoPath is not supported for SharePoint 2013 workflows. Which means that in order to modify the layout users need to directly manipulate the .aspx format.

Despite the modifications explained already, the Save and Cancel buttons cannot be manipulated from SharePoint or SharePoint Designer. What’s more, the Task Status and Task Outcome type columns need to exist in a content type in order for the custom outcome buttons to appear. The order of the buttons follow the order of the choice values in the Task Outcome type columns included in the content type. The Task Outcome type columns are defined as Site Columns under Site Settings.

Figure 18 Additional Column Settings example for a Task Outcome type column

Summary

Two new actions are introduced in SharePoint 2013 workflows. The task form for the actions are modifiable from SharePoint sites and from the SharePoint Designer client without any developer level knowledge. Create a new Custom Content type that inherits the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) Content type, add it to your Tasks list, use the new content type in your workflow, and modify the Custom Content type as needed.

Additional customizations of the form are possible by modifying the .aspx format, but that is out of scope for this blog.

I hope with this simple technic presented here to you can enable the workflow scenarios you have.

See you again in the next posting!

Chong Youn (John) Choe

How to work with web service using “Call HTTP Web Service” action in SharePoint Designer 2013

spdblog — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 05:07:00 GMT

Hello all, my name is HyongGuk Kim, a Senior Program Manager on the SharePoint Designer team.

In this blog I’m going to talk about how we can easily write a SharePoint 2013 workflow which consumes public or commercial HTTP (REST) web service and how we can simply make it run as a service that sends daily emails by looping.

As you can see in the below video clip, we will build a site workflow named "eBay Daily Deals", which will read the daily deal information from eBay^TM , create deal items in a SharePoint Promoted Links list, and then sends emails to people who want to receive this deal information.

Working with web service using Call HTTP Web Service action

Since the "eBay Daily Deals" workflow is a site workflow, the first thing you have to do is to create a new SharePoint 2013 site workflow. Once the site workflow is created, you simply add three stages, name them properly, and then link them using Go To actions.

Stage 1

Name Stage 1 “Get eBay Daily Deals” and then add four actions and one Loop block, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Workflow stage 1

The first action we added is a Call HTTP Web Service action. The HTTP URI is set to http://www.firstamong.com/json/index.php?q=http://deals.ebay.com/feeds/xml and the HTTP method is set to “GET”. It would have been great to just use one of eBay’s REST web services which returns JSON but due to an annoying header inside eBay's REST web service outcome we had to use an extra transformer web service (Note that there are a couple of transformer services available. In our case we used a service from www.firstamong.com) which calls eBay's another REST web service which returns XML and returns clean JSON objects to us.

In the "Call HTTP Web Service" action statement we do not set RequestContent or RequestHeaders parameter because we don’t need to. We are only interested in the output of that web service. By simply setting the response parameter to a variable ResponseContent, the output of this web service call will get stored in the variable ResponseContent, which is a dictionary type variable.

The JSON output of the transformer web service which called eBay's XML web service looks like this:

{"EbayDailyDeals":

{"Item":[

{"ItemId":"221065015062","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NDI4WDUxMA==\/$(KGrHqJHJBwE8+9eOVMzBPZ1lhNt!g~~60_1.JPG","SmallPictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NDI4WDUxMA==\/$(KGrHqJHJBwE8+9eOVMzBPZ1lhNt!g~~60_1.JPG","Picture175Url":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NDI4WDUxMA==\/$(KGrHqJHJBwE8+9eOVMzBPZ1lhNt!g~~60_1.JPG","Title":"Acer ICONIA 7in Tablet 8GB WiFi","Description":"N\/A","DealURL":"http:\/\/deals.ebay.com\/5000101083_Acer_ICONIA_7in _Tablet_8GB_WiFi","ConvertedCurrentPrice":"139.99","PrimaryCategoryName":"Computers\/Tablets & Networking:iPads, Tablets & eBook Readers","PrimaryCategoryId":"171485","Location":"Miami, Florida","Quantity":"128","QuantitySold":"372","MSRP":"299.99","SavingsRate":"53%","AutoPay":"true","Hot":"false","Tier":"0","PriceDisplay":"MSRP"},

{"ItemId":"271012700385","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/MzYwWDM2MA==\/$(KGrHqR,!ioE-w!y!T--BPto5nEk0!~~60_1.JPG","SmallPictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/MzYwWDM2MA==\/$(KGrHqR,!ioE-w!y!T--BPto5nEk0!~~60_1.JPG","Picture175Url":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/MzYwWDM2MA==\/$(KGrHqR,!ioE-w!y!T--BPto5nEk0!~~60_1.JPG","Title":"Sylvania Wireless CE 7-Inch Smartbook - SYNET7WIC","Description":"N\/A","DealURL":"http:\/\/deals.ebay.com\/5000101099_Sylvania_Wireless_CE_7_Inch_Smartbook___SYNET7WIC","ConvertedCurrentPrice":"49.99","PrimaryCategoryName":"Computers\/Tablets & Networking:Laptops & Netbooks:PC Laptops & Netbooks","PrimaryCategoryId":"177","Location":"US","Quantity":"1307","QuantitySold":"693","MSRP":"199.99","SavingsRate":"75%","AutoPay":"true","Hot":"false","Tier":"0","PriceDisplay":"MSRP"},

{"ItemId":"160823596564","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NjAwWDM1MQ==\/$(KGrHqFHJFQE+T-

...

"MoreDeals":

{"MoreDealsSection":[

{"SectionTitle":"Emergency Preparedness","Item":[

{"ItemId":"200687021159","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NDI5WDUwMA==\/$(KGrHqV,!p0E-vF(Fmt0BP7iH6)M6g~~60_1.JPG","SmallPictureURL":"http:\/\/thumbs4.ebaystatic.com\/pict\/200687021159_1.jpg","Picture175Url":"http:\/\/thumbs4.ebaystatic.com\/pict\/200687021159_1.jpg","Title":"DuroMax 1500 Watt Portable Pull Start Gas Power Job Site Electric Generator","Description":"NA","DealURL":"http:\/\/deals.ebay.com\/5000099668_DuroMax_1500_Watt_Portable_Pull_Start_Gas_Power_Job_Site_Electric_Generator","ConvertedCurrentPrice":"179.99","PrimaryCategoryName":"Home & Garden:Tools:Generators: Home-Use","PrimaryCategoryId":"46412","Location":"La Verne","Quantity":"302","QuantitySold":"228","MSRP":"299.99","SavingsRate":"40%","AutoPay":"true","Hot":"false","Tier":"0","PriceDisplay":"MSRP"},

{"ItemId":"370622857968","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/MTAwMFgxMDAw\/$T2eC16h,!)0E9s37IeSMBP7IWFtFqw~~60_12.JPG","SmallPictureURL":"http:\/\/thumbs1.ebaystatic.com\/pict\/370622857968_1.jpg","Picture175Url":"http:\/\/thumbs1.ebaystatic.com\/pict\/370622857968_1.jpg","Title":"Dorcy High Beam LED Aluminum Flashlight 100 Lumens Water Resistant 41-4287","Description":"NA","DealURL":"http:\/\/deals.ebay.com\/5000099680_Dorcy_High_Beam_LED_Aluminum_Flashlight_100_Lumens_Water_Resistant_41_4287","ConvertedCurrentPrice":"11.99","PrimaryCategoryName":"Sporting Goods:Outdoor Sports:Camping & Hiking:Flashlights, Lanterns & Lights:Flashlights","PrimaryCategoryId":"16037","Location":"Altatac USA","Quantity":"1899","QuantitySold":"1113","MSRP":"49.99","SavingsRate":"76%","AutoPay":"false","Hot":"false","Tier":"0","PriceDisplay":"MSRP"},

{"ItemId":"300725740900","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NTAwWDUwMA==\/

...

By the way, to handle each internal item we could also have used a DealItems variable so that we can put our action statement like “Get ([%Variable: Index%])/Title from Variable: DealItems” to get item’s Title property. However, just to make it things simple and to show a clear structure of deal items inside web service output, I put full path to access item’s properties. So having the statement like “Get EbayDailyDeals/Item([%Variable: Index%])/Title from Variable: ResponseContent“ (not Variable: DealItems) will retrieve Title property of an item. For more information on using dictionary type please refer to the links provided at the bottom of this blog.

Figure 2 shows how we retrieve all the different properties of each internal items.

Figure 2. Retrieving properties of deal items and creating promotion link items

With the Get item from Dictionary action we store every property of each deal item into a workflow variable and then use them when we create a list item at the later part of Loop block. Most of variable types we are using in this "retrieve" process are of type string but you can notice that we are using other types too.

For more information on using dictionary type please refer to the links provided at the end of this blog.

Figure 3. Local variables

We also use the Replace String action to work-around a SharePoint limitation where we can't use ',' or '!' characters in a URL type data.

And at the end of the Loop block there are two Step blocks where we build the Email content and increment the index variable by one. The two main scenarios of this workflow are to create list items using the outcome of the eBay web service and then to send Emails to people who want to receive "eBay Daily Deals" information. As such, we are building an HTML fragment inside the Loop block as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Two steps in Loop block

You can see that the workflow variables we used to create the list items are all being reused in building the HTML fragment as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Building HTML fragment for Email body

Stage 2

The workflow logic in Stage 2 is exactly the same as the workflow logic in Stage 1 except for one statement which calls web service in Stage 1 (see the circled statement in Figure 6). As such, you can easily create Stage 2 by just copying and pasting the content of Stage1 into Stage 2.

Stage 2 will read an additional section within the eBay’s Daily Deals web service output. Therefore, we can use the same logic but use a different path when trying to retrieve the Item array from the above big JSON output.

Figure 6. Workflow stage 2

And this means we need to use a different path for accessing items in “MoreDealsSection”, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7. Getting more deal items in MoreDealsSection

Everything else is exactly the same.

Stage 3

In Stage 1 and Stage 2 we created list items and also built the HTML fragments to use when sending Emails later. Stage 3 is the place where we will send emails and thus has only one action, the Send Email action as shown in Figure 8. “Subscribers” is the SharePoint group where all the site members who want to receive Daily Deals Email are added as members.

Figure 8. Workflow stage 3

You can compose a complete Email body in HTML in the property grid dialog of the Send Email action as shown below. Since we already have a complex HTML table code fragment in the variable EmailContent, we only have to put a few wrapper tags around that variable lookup, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. Building a complete Email body

This is it! You are now completely ready to publish and start this workflow.

Just make sure you have an "eBay Daily Deals" list in your site and it should be a "Promoted Links" type list which is a new cool list type in SharePoint 2013. You can easily find this list app when you click Add an app from the Settings link which is in the right top corner of your site root page.

Start the Workflow

When you start this workflow you will see the workflow creating eBay Daily Deal items in your "eBay Daily Deals" list and you will also notice that you have Emails being sent from this workflow.

Figure 10. eBay Daily Deals promoted links list

Figure 11. Email sent from workflow

Loop Back?

We saw how we can build a good site workflow which sends Email with eBay Daily Deals information in it. What if we want to receive this email “every day”? Will it be possible to have this workflow run repeatedly every 24 hours?

Yes! As shown below by adding a Pause for Duration action and changing the target of the Go To statement inside of Stage 3 to point back to Stage 1, this workflow will now work like a service which will retrieve eBay's Daily Deals items and will then send these deals as Email every day.

Sounds fun, right?

Figure 12. Looping back to the beginning

References

Here are references where you can find more information on the dictionary type and workflow actions which handle dictionary variables and HTTP web services.

SharePoint Designer 2013 Help Content

MSDN: Understanding Dictionary actions in SharePoint Designer 2013
MSDN: Calling HTTP web service with Dictionary (this content is not yet available)

Packaging SharePoint 2013 List, Site, and Reusable Workflow and How to Deploy the Package

spdblog — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 05:27:49 GMT

Hello. This is JongHwa Lim – a Program Manager from SharePoint Designer (aka. SPD) team.

Today I’d like to introduce a feature which has been enhanced a lot from SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. It is the workflow package feature. A very common scenario for those who used this feature in SharePoint Designer 2010, was to develop one workflow in a development environment and then deploy it to a production environment. Unfortunately, the bad news was that this was supported only for reusable workflow types in SharePoint Designer 2010.

In SharePoint Designer 2013 along with SharePoint Server 2013 and Azure Workflow Service, we now support all three workflow types – list workflow, site workflow, and reusable workflow. This is superb. This means you don’t have to confine yourself only to the reusable workflow and the old story that you had to migrate your list workflows to reusable workflows for this purpose are all now gone.

An example will help tell this story much better. I will build a sample workflow and show how it can be reused in a target site.

Example: a Vacation Request list workflow

Let’s say you are going to create a list workflow on a development environment. The workflow has two lists – Vacation list and Vacation Request list. Vacation list keeps the number of remaining vacations for all the employees and Vacation Request list is where the requestor will create a request item to request approval for vacation.

Create necessary lists (development environment)

As said, we need two lists so I created two lists as below. Note that we will use the default settings for the ‘Task List’ and ‘History List’.

Create list workflow on Vacation Request list

Now that you have the necessary lists ready, use SPD to connect to the server, click ‘List Workflow’, and then choose ‘Vacation Request’ list. You will be shown a dialog below and make sure you choose ‘SharePoint 2013 Workflow’ type after you type in the workflow name.

Fill in the logic and Publish the workflow

In the SPD canvas, you can choose text-based designer or if Visio Professional is installed you can choose the visual designer to author the workflow. In this blog, I will use the text-based designer but if you are interested in the visual designer, please refer to another blog post on the visual designer, which will be available soon.

Please add the following logic. In general, it is very straight-forward except for a couple points. It consists of five stages. Each stage’s title explains what it is for but to explain it in more detail, I’ve described them below:

‘Check if remaining vacation exists’ stage – fetch the remaining vacation days for the initiator and compare it to the requested vacation days
‘Approval Process’ stage – request approval for the requested vacation days
‘Approved’ stage – when approved, update the Vacation list with the new calculated value
‘Rejected’ stage – send rejection mail
‘insufficient vacation’ stage – send mail on the insufficient remaining vacation days

The tricky parts are these lookup UIs to fetch the remaining vacation days from Vacation list or to update the Vacation list.

You can opt to turn on ‘auto start by item creation’ option if it makes more sense.

And when you publish the workflow the workflow association will be created and the status column will be made behind the scenes.

Package the lists into STP packages

There are several ways by which you can guarantee that the target server has the necessary lists and schemas but leveraging STP package is a good practice. So let’s package Vacation list and Vacation Request list into a STP packages.

You can do this via either server UI or SPD UI as shown below.

Then, you will see the following screen where you can type in the name and choose to package the contents as well.

Note that SharePoint 2013 list workflow is not packaged together whether you choose to ‘Include Content’ or not.

And if successful, it will guide you to a place where you can download the package.

Click the link and download the package for later use.

If successful, you must have two STP packages now, one package for the Vacation Request list and another for the Vacations list (the list that contains the remaining vacation days).

Package the workflow into WSP package

To package the list workflow, go to the workflow summary page and click the ‘Save as Template’ button in the Ribbon.

The following dialog will be shown.

You can find ‘Site Assets’ library in the Navigation pane and you can find the list workflow package in it. (You may need to refresh the page to see the package.)

Use the ‘Export File’ Ribbon button to save it to the local machine.

Deploy the STP packages

Open the target site(or production environment) in your browser and go to ‘Site Settings’. You can find ‘List templates’ menu under ‘Web Designer Galleries’ group.

Using the ‘Upload Document’ under ‘Files’ menu, upload the two STP packages.

Create lists using the deployed list templates

You can create the two lists from the deployed list templates. Go to ‘Site Contents’ in the navigation menu in the server and click ‘add an app’. You should be able to find ‘Vacation’ and ‘Vacation Request’ icons.

Create ‘Vacation’ and ‘Vacation Request’ lists using those menus.

Deploy the WSP package and activate the package

Deploying WSP package is a bit different from deploying STP list templates. You must upload it to ‘Solutions’ library under ‘Web Designer Galleries’ group in Site Settings.

Then, you will be prompted with a dialog where you need to activate the package(solution).

Activate the Feature

After activating the solution, you will see there is a new site feature in ‘Manage site features’ under ‘Site Actions’ of Site Settings.

This is it. You can find this workflow by the name you used when you packaged it. Click the ‘Activate’ button and wait until the button changes to ‘Deactivate’ or the ‘Active’ icon is shown, which will mean that the feature is activated.

(Optional) Open the workflow from SPD

There are cases when you want to update the workflow in the target site. No problem. It is just the same as your development environment. You can find the deployed workflow correctly listed in SPD.

And it will open without any issues. You can see that the values in the summary page remain the same. And of course, the logic is preserved as well.

(Optional) Run the workflow

After you run the workflow from the server, you may find that there are two columns with the same name(workflow status column). This is a known issue. One column comes from the source server(packaged in STP) and the other column is created in the target site. Please update the list view to hide the old column.

What is the alternative to using STP package?

The solution will be properly deployed as long as the target site has the necessary lists – lists that are used in the workflow logic along with the Workflow Task and Workflow History lists. But it is best to create the lists and list columns referenced in the workflow using the same list template and same field type. If there is a type mismatch, the package can fail during the feature activation time or the workflow will fail at runtime.

What happens if the workflow package is deployed to a site where ‘Vacation’ or ‘Vacation Request’ lists don’t exist?

The site feature activation will fail.

The error message is not very detailed but if you look at the ULS log, you can find some hints like the following:

“Workflow XAML failed validation due to the following errors: Failed to create a 'ListId' from the text '$ListId:Lists/Vacation;”

But once the feature activation has failed, re-activation of the feature may fail again even after you create the necessary lists. This is because your workflow definition is deployed incompletely. You need to do the following:

Open SPD and delete the workflow definition which failed during feature activation
Deactivate the solution and remove the solution
Upload the solution and activate the solution
Activate the site feature

This should solve the problem.

Known Issues

These are the known issues of workflow package.

You need to guarantee that the relative list urls (eg. ‘Lists/Vacation’) are the same. Even if you create a list with a given name and then change it to a different name, the list url will not change, this is because it is based on the original display name. As such, even though you packaged the workflow based on the list’s updated name, the workflow will still look for a list url based on the old name in the target site. Therefore, when you are recreating the lists in the target site, you must make sure that you initially give the lists the original name, and not the updated name. This way the list url will be preserved. After the list is created, you can change the list’s name to the updated one.
Workflows with Unicode or DBCS names will be packaged into wsp files with the default hard-coded name of ‘WorkflowSolution.wsp’
You need to manually refresh the page after you go to Site Assets to see the updated list of solutions.
If the target server doesn’t have the Workflow Task list and Workflow History list, the below error can show up when you click on the workflow from the Workflow Settings page. This happens when you deploy the workflow to a target server where no workflows has ever been created before. As a workaround, you can create and publish a dummy workflow from SPD to create the Workflow Task list and Workflow History list. And then you can open the deployed workflow from SPD, adjust the Workflow Task list and Workflow History list settings and republish the workflow.
Project workflow will be packaged like a regular site workflow. But to guarantee it works, you need to also package project entities such as EPT, Stages, custom columns, and so on. Please refer to the project workflow guideline which will be provided by the Project team.

Thanks,

JongHwa

How to trigger a SharePoint 2010 workflow from a SharePoint 2013 workflow

spdblog — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 16:55:35 GMT

Hello guys,

I’m Chong Youn (John) Choe, a PM in SharePoint Designer team. SharePoint and SharePoint Designer 2013 beta 2 is now on public, making us Product Group members delighted to share supplementary postings with you.

This posting will describe why calling the legacy style workflow is enabled and how to use it.

Background

First of all, this feature is expected to greatly enhance the reusability of SPD workflows. Users will be able to set up highly reusable workflows on SharePoint sites and take advantage of the workflows just like scripts or functions.

It was not possible for the capabilities of SharePoint 2013 workflows to fully replace all the functionalities of SharePoint 2010 actions due to the fact that SharePoint 2013 is based on a different platform and has been rebuilt upon it. The workflow product teams invested on making new features to enable richer new end-user scenarios and gave up less frequently used features based on user feedbacks.

Nevertheless, the workflow product teams strongly wanted to cover all the existing scenarios. Consequently the “Start a Workflow” actions were designed to let the end users combine SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 by enabling inter-workflow calling from 2013 workflow to 2010 workflow. It was the only economic solution to provide a migration path for current SPD users.

Workflows can be categorized into 3 types; List workflow, Reusable workflow, and Site workflow. For details please refer to the blog posting. Reusable workflow takes in input parameters at the association time, and can be triggered on a list and an item in the list as if it were a List workflow afterwards. To start a workflow, SharePoint 2010 workflow should be ready for run at the moment it is called, which means that it needs to be already associated if it is a Reusable workflow. Hence, these are supported by a single action “Start a List Workflow” which receives 3 parameters; the SharePoint 2010 associated workflow to be triggered, initiation form parameters, and target item the associated workflow will run on. On the contrary, Site workflow does not need an item to run on so rely on another action “Start a Site Workflow” which receives 2 parameters; the SharePoint 2010 site workflow to be triggered, and initiation form parameters.

Last but not least, in case you want to know what are underneath the surface, “workflow interop bridge” can be found here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj163181(office.15).

Example Scenario

Now that you understand the concept, let’s talk about how and when to use these actions. An example scenario and a step-by-step description is going to be presented. J

Assume there has been a “Budget Approval” workflow being used in SharePoint 2010 site. An IT admin had decided to upgrade the SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013, the existing SharePoint 2010 workflows have been migrated to the new site subsequently (note: this does not mean the workflows were upgraded to SharePoint 2013 workflows. These workflows are still SharePoint 2010 workflows). The “Budget Approval” workflow is used for requesting budget from the finance or HR department, and takes 4 parameters as input; “Budget requested” for the requested amount of money, “Explanation” to describe why it is needed, “Requested approval due date” for the response due date, and “Reference” to point any related information.

Let say you want to use the “Budget Approval” workflow as a part of a new workflow process, in the past you would have to create a new workflow and rewrite the workflow in the new framework. And if you want to combine 2013 workflow’s newly introduced features along with the “Budget Approval” workflow it might have been impossible to write it all into one workflow.

The “Start a Workflow” actions are a perfect solution in such a case. Let’s assume the “Budget Approval” workflow is a List Workflow under “Contoso finance” list where Contoso’s financial processes are automated by workflows.

Design Steps

1. Insert “Start a List Workflow” action when the target workflow to be triggered is a List Workflow or a Reusable Workflow associated to a list.

2. With the action inserted, the workflow or association needs to be selected first, do this by clicking on the “SharePoint 2010 list workflow” link.

3. Find the list the target workflow resides in, and choose the workflow in turn.

4. Click “OK” to close above dialog. Next, click on the “parameters” link found in the Start a List workflow action sentence. SharePoint Designer 2013 will then analyze the workflow and display initiation parameters and their predefined values.

The dialog will display additional “Type” information for each of the different parameters. That’s because the author of the SharePoint 2013 workflow may be different from that of the SharePoint 2010 workflow and we wanted to provide enough information for the author of the SharePoint 2013 workflow to set the initiation form parameter values without looking into the called workflow.

5. You can set each parameter’s value during design time, lookup values are allowed to be chosen here and the value will be actually set during run time. This makes it flexible enough to design an integrated process using a SharePoint 2013 workflow calling and a SharePoint 2010 workflow called.
Restrictions are also given on the dialog, so you do not need to learn the parameter’s information beforehand.

6. Of course you can also set the value by typing it directly in the text editor. Note that dialog and its functionalities differ by the parameter types.

7. When you press “…”, a corresponding designer type for the type of parameter being populated pops up and guides your input. While standard lookup dialog is displayed when “Fx” button is clicked.

8. Once the parameters are all set, close the “Set Values for Initiation Parameters” dialog. The number of parameters set will be displayed directly on the action sentence.

9. Next, choose the item that the target workflow will run on. Usually you will want to run the process on “the current item”, which means that the calling workflow and called workflow to be executed and leave logs and results on the same item. To support the general scenario you should choose “Current Item” for “this item” parameter.

And you’re done! Calling a SharePoint 2010 workflow is as simple as adding an action sentence and setting appropriate values. J Actually the process resembles the behavior of end users triggering the SharePoint 2010 workflow on the SharePoint server. Choosing a list, an item and an associated workflow, and filling out the initiation form. The end user steps on the SharePoint server are below.

Another great feature is that you can use the value of called workflow’s variables inside the SharePoint 2013 workflow calling. These variables will be made available in the SharePoint 2013 workflow through the use of the lookup dialog.

I will explain this further with an example scenario.

A new company policy is declared, the workflow designer needs to send a notification email to the participants of the budget approval process to review the new policy.

10. Add “Send an email” action to send emails to the participants of the budget approval.

11. To lookup the SharePoint 2010 workflow’s variables, choose “Workflow Lookup for a User” for the “To” control.

12. A new data source is automatically made after inserting the “Start a List/Site Workflow” action and choosing the SharePoint 2010 workflow. The name of the data source consists of a static text “SharePoint 2010 Output” and the workflow’s name.

13. Every variable of the “Budget Approval” will be displayed in the 2^nd dropdown: “Field from source”. Choose the required variable and press the “OK” button to set the “to” value in the email dialog.

14. Fill in the “CC” section likewise. Note that the variables are manually created by the person who created the SharePoint 2010 workflow. Fill in the rest of the fields with whatever values you wish.

I hope that you can now understand how to use the return values from SharePoint 2010 workflow well.

The previous example showed how you can use the “Start a Workflow” actions to call into a legacy workflow. You can extend upon this concept though, and use the same action to add additional functionalities into the SharePoint 2013 workflows. For example, there are some actions which are only available in the SharePoint 2010 workflows (i.e. the lookup manager action), you could use the “Start a Workflow” actions to trigger another workflow that use these legacy actions and expand the capabilities.

Once you master the “Start a Workflow” actions and its usage. SharePoint 2013 workflow and SharePoint 2010 workflow will no longer feel like separate workflow forms. J

Limitations

There are limitations in fully combining the strengths of SharePoint 2013 and 2010 workflows.

Some are due to design changes in the new platform. For instance “Assignment Stages” type parameters are not supported in “Start a Workflow” since the parameter type is no longer supported in SharePoint 2013 workflows. In other words, you need to use SharePoint 2010 workflow by itself if you must use “Start Approval Process”.

In addition, any workflow you want to link to using the “Start a Workflow” action should reside in one site. However, all of the different workflows will have their workflow status pages displayed on separate pages.

And finally, calling workflows associated to a different list cannot run on the current item of the SharePoint 2013 workflow. This is expected since the two workflows would be running against different lists. As such, if running a workflow on a different list, you will need to choose a specific item in the target workflow’s list to run the workflow against.

Summary

A “Start a Workflow” action triggers a SharePoint 2010 workflow in the middle of a SharePoint 2013 workflow’s execution at the run time. It has two types of action depending on the called workflow’s type, “Start a List Workflow” and “Start a Site Workflow”.

Choose the target workflow and set the initiation parameters of the workflow with fixed values or dynamic values. Also choose the list where the workflow belongs and the item the workflow will run on in case of “Start a List Workflow”.

You’ll be able to put this action anywhere in a SharePoint 2013 workflow, even calling multiple SharePoint 2010 workflows is allowed. You can reuse existing SharePoint 2010 workflows without re writing the actions in it. It is a very efficient and handy method to blend SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 workflows.

In addition, the return values from the SharePoint 2010 workflows called are made available to the calling SharePoint 2013 workflow’s logic via the lookup dialog. Return values include all the local variables and a few more conditional variables as well for any SharePoint 2010 workflow called in the same SharePoint 2013 workflow.

I hope you enjoy the benefits this brings!

Chong Youn (John) Choe

A Sample SharePoint 2013 Approval Workflow Which can be Recalled by the Initiator

spdblog — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 06:50:25 GMT

Hi, I am JongHwa Lim, a Program Manager for SharePoint Designer 2013 (aka. SPD 2013 or SPD). Today, I’d like to share a simple workflow which reflects a real world scenario and also gives you some hints on what can be done with the new SPD workflow designer, based on the WF4 platform.

There are many real world process examples that require an initiator to recall a process when s/he finds that there is something wrong with the item or information s/he already submitted. As such, I’d like to build a simple workflow that leverages the parallel step construct and two task actions available in the WF4 platform.

This is the basic workflow skeleton. Please note that parallel step is used to run two silos(sub steps) in parallel – the normal approval process and the recall process.

From now on, I will explain how this works and show the runtime behaviors as well.

In WF4, the parallel step provides an optional short-cut feature. If you right-click the parallel step and click ‘Advanced Properties’, you will see the following dialog where you can choose to use the short-cut feature. You will need a Boolean variable to use this feature which is why we used the ‘IsShortCut’ variable in the above logic.

As soon as any of the silos is finished executing, the other silo will be automatically cancelled and the parallel step will be finished. As you can see, one silo contains the normal approval process and the other silo contains the recall process. When the workflow execution enters the parallel step, the tasks for the normal approval process and the task for the recall process will be created in parallel. (In this sample workflow, ‘Anne Weiler’ is the submitter.)

If the normal approval process is completed, then we will no longer need to recall the workflow so the recall process will be automatically cancelled as the execution reaches the end of the first silo. The task created for the recall process will also be deleted from the task list. Likewise, if the recall process is completed by completing the recall task, the normal approval process is automatically cancelled.

Again, this workflow is just a skeleton example. To make it more realistic, you may need to add additional logic to make decisions based on the task outcome and you may need to use a custom task content type if you wish to use different outcomes, other than ‘Approved’ and ‘Rejected’.

A more completed workflow might look like this.

This is a very simple yet very powerful example of a workflow. Hope you enjoyed this article and found some insight/hint on what you plan to do with SPD workflows.

Thanks,

JongHwa

Copy-and-Paste support in SharePoint Designer 2013

spdblog — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 08:29:50 GMT

Hello, fans of SPD. I am JongHwa Lim, a Program Manager of SharePoint Designer (aka. SPD). I’d like to introduce a new feature within the workflow designer in SharePoint Designer 2013.

This new feature is the ability to Copy-and-Paste within the text-based designer. The Copy-And-Paste feature was one of the biggest asks we got for the old SPD versions. We received tons of feedback from customers saying that they had to spend far too many meaningless hours and even days to recreate logic that they had already created once. This repetitive work was commonly needed for ‘Else’ branches within If statements, and for when processes required ‘Repetition’. Well, that’s now in the past thanks to the new Copy-Paste feature.

I will explain the feature with some basic sample scenarios and then explain what is supported and what is not-supported in detail.

Note. This article contains some new workflow actions and constructs available on the new workflow platform and they will be introduced very soon via this blog and help articles. So stay tuned!!

Example – Simple Approval workflow

Let’s say that you have a SharePoint 2013 type workflow on a SharePoint 2013 server. You have to create a document approval workflow which sends out email notifications for approval/rejection events and will then copy the document to the appropriate folder depending on the approval status.

You can basically build this workflow by first focusing in on what the workflow should do when the document is approved. This is because the logic for when the document is rejected will be nearly identical. The “Document Approved” logic is shown below:

And the email contents would look like this.

Back when Copy-and-Paste was not supported, you had to basically rewrite all the logic again for the ‘Rejected’ stage, which in this case was luckily only 3 actions and 1 stage, but nevertheless was still very annoying. However, as you now know Copy-and-Paste is available in SPD 2013, you can now select the ‘Approved’ stage, press Ctrl-C and then Ctrl-V directly beneath it, which leads to this.

You’ll notice that the Stage title is not preserved but all of the other parameter values are preserved. You can click on the ‘Approved Documents’ link to change it to ‘Rejected Documents’, and edit the Email action to change the mail contents to reflect the ‘rejected status’ as below.

After you update the stage title to ‘Rejected’ and update the logic within the transition section for the ‘Wait For Approval’ stage, your completed workflow logic will look like the below.

So what do you think? Even in this short workflow scenario, it helped a lot. And since we support multiple-adjacent-selections, this new feature really helps to make things more convenient. You can select multiple lines of actions, steps and conditional blocks, or multiple stages, then copy and paste them into the places where you need the logic. Selected items will be highlighted in a sky-blue color as shown below.

Then, you can choose to use the well-known hot keys: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, or Ctrl-X, or use the Ribbon menu or the context menu of any selected item.

Well, now that you know we have Copy-and Paste working, you must be getting curious about some of the different scenarios Copy-and Paste opens up. I will explain several commonly asked questions regarding Copy-and-Paste below.

How about SharePoint 2010 Workflow type?

We also support copy-and-paste for SharePoint 2010 Workflow type (aka. WF3.5 type). Basically the UX will be identical whether you use WF4 workflow or WF3.5 workflow in SPD.

Let’s say you have the following workflow that only handles ‘Approved’ status.

After you insert an ‘else’ branch and select the two actions highlighted in blue, you can paste them right into the ‘else’ section.

It will result in the following logic.

Note: I updated the properties of the final action to reflect the proper ‘rejected’ status.

How about actions which contains lookup values to other list when they are pasted to a different site without that list?

Let’s use this example. If you paste actions which look up values in another list onto a different server, the following will happen.

Figure 1. Actions in the source server

Figure 2. Actions in the target server

If you press the ‘Check for Errors’ or ‘Publish’ button, SPD will indicate that there’s no errors, but the workflow will fail at runtime.

So please make sure that you clean up the look ups and update it appropriately after pasting it into a different site.

How about actions which are not allowed in the target workflow/area?

Let’s say you want to copy an action which is only meaningful in a list workflow and paste it into a site workflow. You will then see the following error or validation error when the ‘Check for Errors’ or ‘Publish’ button is pressed.

Paste as Text

There are cases where you want to just document the logic of your workflow. One option would be to use the Visual Designer and export out the diagram to Visio. But you can do this a lot quicker by just selecting the area you want to document, copying it and pasting it into Word or Notepad. Here is the result of the same logic used above when it is pasted into Word.

This is very convenient!

What is not supported

Even though we tried to enable frequently used features found within most editing tools, the following limitations should be noted:

There is no support for Undo (Ctrl-Z)
You cannot select multiple objects by clicking and dragging
You cannot moving selected items by clicking and dragging objects
Shift+Left Mouse Click can be used for multi-selection of actions but it cannot be used to select multiple constructs such as Stage, Step, or Parallel Block.
We also don’t support copy-and-paste across the different workflow platform types. If you try it, you will see one of following messages

Copy-and-paste of workflow actions in the text based designer is not fully integrated with the Clipboard so the ‘Paste’ button within the Clipboard will not work properly
If you try to copy-paste contents across Remote Desktop, it won’t work as we don’t support copy-paste across SPDs with different PIDs
The ‘Build Dictionary’ action does not keep its properties after being pasted

Thanks,

JongHwa

Welcome to SharePoint Designer 2013 Customer Preview

spdblog — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 05:10:18 GMT

Hello All!

The SharePoint Designer team is very proud and happy to announce the release of SharePoint Designer 2013 Customer Preview! This new release of SharePoint Designer is going to bring about a HOST of new and amazing changes which we’re all hoping you guys will love!

Show me the Blogs!

First of all, for those of you who aren’t aware, the entire Microsoft Office organization has setup a blog site where you can find out all of the latest info regarding the new Office 2013. The Office blog can be found here:

http://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/

You can find all sorts of information regarding Office 2013.

We’re also going to be releasing help files online with tons of general information regarding SharePoint Designer 2013. You can find that here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219638%28office.15%29.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/hh850380

You can also find a great set of info on SPD 2013 and the new Workflow architecture here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj163986(v=office.15)

This will be our primary blog though, our current plan is to use this blog for examples and to drill deeper into some of the new features we’ve created for 2013.

Where’s the bits?

First thing is first though, if you’re looking to download a copy of SPD 2013, you can do so here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30346

Important Note: Remember, the new SPD 2013 needs to be connected to a SharePoint 2013 site. And if you want to take advantage of all the new workflow features, you’ll need to install and configure Windows Azure Workflow server.

You can find install and configuration notes here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/jj193528

So what’s new?

The SharePoint Designer team has spent a large amount of effort revamping and changing up how we create and edit workflows in SharePoint Designer 2013. The bulk of the new features are in this area. Here’s a short list of some, but not all, of the new stuff we have for you all:

1) Ability to create workflow based off the new .Net 4.x Workflow Infrastructure

a. While at the same time still able to create and edit the old SharePoint 2010 Workflows

2) Tight integration with Stages.

a. Workflows no longer have to be serial.

b. All 2013 Workflows are now state-based, and you can have your workflow jump to any stage you want, even to a previous stage.

3) The new Visual Designer

a. A brand new design surface that integrates the Visio canvas right inside SharePoint Designer

b. You can create workflows using click and drag

c. You can even set the properties of every action right within the Visual Designer. No need to jump back to the Text-Based Designer if you do not wish to.

4) Copy and Paste

a. You can now Copy, Cut, and Paste within the Text-Based Designer!

5) Loops!

a. Loops are now a fully integrated action which you can use within all 2013 Workflows

6) Call Web Service Action

a. You can now call Rest/HTTP web services right from within SharePoint 2013 workflows.

7) Start Workflow Actions

a. We now have an action that lets you spawn up old 2010 workflows right from within a 2013 workflow.

b. You can use this action to take advantage of any 2010 workflow functionality (e.g. your old custom actions)

8) Packaging

a. You can now package individual workflows straight from within SPD

9) Dictionary Type Variables

a. You can now create variables that can hold an array of values!

b. Combining this with the new Loop action opens up a whole host of new scenarios.

There are still many more new features we’re introducing this release, and we’ll go over them all in separate blog entries. For now, I highly recommend everyone go out and download the current Customer Preview version of SPD and try it out yourselves!

Thanks,

SPD Team

Understanding workflow starting parameters - Part 2

spdblog — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 01:54:00 GMT

Hello all, it’s been a long time since my last writing was posted.

I’m Chong Youn (John) Choe, a PM in SharePoint Designer team. As noticed, this is the second half of the workflow starting parameters blog entries. In this entry I will go over how to extract and manipulate the values passed in from a workflow starting form.

I’d like to begin with apologies for those of you who have long awaited this next post, and thanks to all who have read and sent back feedbacks to the Part 1.

Well then, let’s begin.

What types of parameters exist in the workflow starting parameter?

I’ll briefly recap the types of workflows and workflow starting parameter types. Reading Part 1 is recommended if you can’t understand the following explanation.

There are 3 types of workflow in SharePoint Designer (which refers to SharePoint Designer 2010 from now on, since the post is targeting SharePoint Designer 2010, not any older and newer version) List Workflow, Site Workflow, and Reusable Workflow. While List Workflow and Site Workflow can have only initiation type parameters, Reusable Workflow can have initiation type parameters association type parameters, as well having both parameter types.

Initiation and Association type parameters are differentiated by the phases in which they receive values from the workflow users. Note that there is no difference in terms of supported parameter types, or field types.

Parameter types restriction at a glance

There are 10 types of parameters, this is with the assumption that “Hyperlink” and “Picture” are independent types, described in Part1. All of them can ask for user input during the initiation time, the association time, or during both times.

Field Type	Value Type	Value Range	Required / Optional	Other Settings
Single line of text	String	No limit (length limit 255 characters in 1 line)	Optional (Always allow blank values)
Multiple lines of text	String	No limit (multiple lines)	Optional (Always allow blank values)
Number	Double	Can set Minimum value and Maximum value	Required (Do not allow blank values)
Date and Time	Date and Time	No limit	Required/Optional depends on setting	· Default value can be today · Can restrict input values to be greater than the date/time in which the form was loaded
Choice	String	No limit	Required (One selection is a Must)	· Can differentiate internal data and display strings
Yes/No	Yes/No	Yes/No	Required
Person or Group	People/Group	All People/Group in AD or can restrict to certain Sharepoint Group	Required/Optional depends on setting	· Can allow either only individual person or people and groups · Can allow either only one Person/Group or multiple Person/Group
Hyperlink	URL	Valid URL for hyperlink	Required/Optional depends on setting	· No default value
Picture	URL	Valid URL for picture	Required/Optional depends on setting	· No default value
Assignment Stages	Assignment Stages	Stages of People/Group and Order type	Required (One stage is a Must)	· Parallel Approval, Signatures, etc

Each parameter type and coercion usage in workflow

Here goes the main part of the post. Since there are a lot of combinations for the different types of parameters and their coercion, every input parameter needs to be used via lookup in the workflow. Most users will have to use coercion with parameters. However, due to high level of complexity around coercion, many users find it difficult to fully understand it and as such, give up on making their workflows.

So what is “coercion”? It refers to the “Return field as” portion of the lookup dialog. By selecting the proper return field types, the lookup results can become useful components in workflows.

Every combination will be visited extensively below. In order to comprehend this information, you need to know how to add initiation parameters into workflows, please go through the Part 1 if you are not clear with this.

1) Single line of text

General purpose of using single line of text is for keeping string as itself or as part of a bigger string. As such, the “Log to History” action will be an excellent example to understand this related mechanism.

There are a couple of ways of using this parameter in the action. One is to insert the parameter value in a longer string via String Builder, and another is to pick just the parameter by direct lookup. The coercion options are the same in both methods.

I created loggings for every single option in order to make the results on workflow status page very easy to understand.

The string was designed to test comma and semicolon along with e-mail address style.

The results do not come out in one trial because there are some combinations that are not supported and stop the workflow’s execution during run time. The cumulative results follow.

As the result reveals, the default return field type “As string” can create usual usages for the text-type input parameter.

Note that Display Names, Semicolon Delimited | Email Addresses, Semicolon Delimited | Login name | Login Names, Semicolon Delimited | Lookup Ids, Comma Delimited | Lookup Value (as Text) | Lookup Values, Comma Delimited | User Ids, Semicolon Delimited all have high chances to break your run time behavior so make sure to use them only in the proper cases.

In addition, Description Text and URL create somewhat different results compared to other types that do no manipulation to the original string. We will revisit the two types in Hyperlink and Picture parts.

2) Multiple lines of text

As you might expect, the results are same between Multiple lines of text and Single line of text.

3) Number

Number to string conversion has only two options, As String | Formatted Currency as seen in the “Log to History” actions below.

I put “0.5” as the parameter input – it’s worthwhile to remember that numbers used in SharePoint Designer workflow are double type instead of integer. In general, the default value of “As String” should work for most scenarios. Also note that the workflow will modify the number value when type conversion is needed, for example, pause for duration action only takes in integer numbers and as such rounds 0.5 into 1. So take the type into account whenever you design a workflow where numbers are critical.

A couple other examples of number conversions can be seen in the “Do Calculation” and “Wait for Duration” actions, as they only serve single “As Double” conversion. They are quite straight forward as you can see in the following screenshot.

4) Date and Time

Three basic actions are closely related with Date and Time type variable. I made two initiation parameters one for Date and Time, and another for Date only type to compare their usage in a given workflow.

Date and Time lookup only support return field type of “As Date/Time”. Hence it is straight forward.

Watch how the sample workflow is designed, what the input is, and what the result is. This should help you understand how to play with the Date and Time type parameters.

Adding or setting time to Date and Time variable is very simple. Two things to address are that there is no “Date only” type conversion available for “Log to history” action for instance, and “Date only” type initiation parameter does have Time information but it is just hidden from the UI. The Time portion is set to equal the time in which the Date form is loaded. Remember this fact to avoid possible errors in your workflow design.

5) Choice

Choice type parameters are strings but have a unique attribute. They let you set its value and its display name separately. Here are some examples.

When you set the parameter, each choice should be in a line, and the value or display name should be separated by one “|”, there really should not be any reason to use “|” in either value nor display name, so I’ll skip further explanation on what happens when there are two or more “|”s.

Note that only display names are shown instead of the values. “display name1” for with a value of “value1” was set when the initiation parameter was created. I used the default value as it was and triggered the workflow.

There is no way of retrieving the display name in the workflow. A possible workaround is to create additional logic in your workflow that creates a separate string type variable which you can manually populate with the display name.

6) Yes/No

The primary purpose of using Yes/No parameters is for branching logic.

Workflow is smart enough to offer only Yes/No selection if you set left operand of If clause with Yes/No type parameter!

Yes/No to String type conversion has only a single return field type, nothing to worry about.

In short, this Boolean type is very easy to use. Let’s confirm it by observing the below workflow example and its execution result.

In the initiation/association form, users can check or uncheck the checkbox which refers to yes or no.

In the result, those are mapped to True/False. It feels natural since it’s a Boolean type indeed.

7) Person or Group

The Person or Group parameter is a bit more complex, reading Person or Group in Part 1 of this posting along with this section should hopefully be enough for your tasks.

In this example, we are leveraging the settings page. By choosing “People Only”, unchecking “Allow blank values?” and “Allow multiple values?”, only 1 person will be allowed to be set in the initiation form to start the workflow.

People’s information is required for activities that require participants, such as, the Task Actions or Sending an email action. Since finding a person takes a few steps and is not that intuitive, I’ll use the simple “Send an email” action to guide you.

Add the action and click “these users”. On the email message dialog, “To:” and “CC:” fields allow for people or group as input. Once the people picker is launched, the left side will display some related people and group, you will need to find the lookup option in amongst the list of People and Groups.

The lookup for Person or Group pops up by double clicking the “Workflow Lookup for a User…” string. Choose the parameter and leave the return field type as it is, and close the dialogs with the “OK” button.

The Person or Group lookup works as shown in the example regardless of the value of setting options in initiation parameters.

8) Hyperlink

In most cases, “Single line of text” can cover the scenarios whenever a “hyperlink” type is needed. Thus, I’m going to describe the differences of Hyperlink and Picture type parameters.

These user inputs have a couple of differences compared to the “Single line of text” parameter type. The first difference is that users can set the Address and Display text separately. The Address is validated if it’s a URL.

The display text is written on the form instead of the address.

What’s more, the conversion result is slightly different from that of “single line of text”.

You would already have caught that URL and Description Text types are designed for Hyperlink/Picture. The data is passed as “Address” + “, “ + “Display name” format, and URL and Description Text type extracts only “Address” and “Display name” part, respectively. Actually, Description Text type detects “,” and takes string from two spots next to the “,” so you could play tricks with it for fun.

9) Picture

As you might expect, the results are same between Picture and Hyperlink.

10) Assignment Stages

The concept of the “Assignment Stages” is very complicated but it is a very powerful component. Things around Office Task will be made into another blog post. You can also search the technet.microsoft.com for related materials for now.

Summary

I strongly recommend you to read Part 1 before reading this material. Also whenever you feel some explanation is missing, please check Part 1 posting first.

For receiving and using normal text input parameters, use these in appropriate actions with the “As String” return type.

Number input parameters are double, while some actions take the parameters in integer format.

Date and Time input parameters are used in two formats but are actually a single type.

Choice input parameters have both value and display name. While end-users choose by the name, workflows only see the value that is matched with the name.

It’s best to think of the Yes/No input parameters as Boolean type parameters which are useful in condition statements.

Person or Group input parameter can be conveyed to workflow actions inside of email receivers or task participants. To fully utilize this capability, understanding the settings and steps in the lookup dialog are required.

Hyperlink/Picture type receives address and displaying text, these can be distinguished by the “URL” type and “Description Text” type, respectively.

Thank you! And sorry again for the long wait time between posts.

Chong Youn (John) Choe

Understanding workflow starting parameters - Part 1

spdblog — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 09:18:00 GMT

Hello all, I’m Chong Youn (John) Choe, a PM on the SharePoint Designer team. SharePoint Designer is a handy tool and is designed to embrace those who are not developers. I will be creating a series of posts about fundamental features that can help you become confident in using SharePoint Designer. What’s even better is that these features are enough for you to create powerful workflows!

I’m going to begin with the starting parameters. A couple of posts will be created on this topic, the concept behind and understanding how to gather user input will be explained in this post. How to extract the values and manipulate them will be demonstrated in the next post.

Let’s get to the point then.

What are these for?

Certain type of data cannot be determined when you are designing a workflow. For example, the amount of money in an expense report or the target date in a vacation request are examples of data that cannot be determined while creating a workflow. As such, we should design starting parameters to receive such data when needed.

When does a workflow receive user input? (What is initiation and association?)

Assume a paper-based working circumstance. The amount of money or a target date could be written when an employee hands in the expense report sheets or vacation request sheets. This is an example of information being filled up at the moment the workflow starts.

Imagine a basic format of a sheet used in a company, and its variations are used in different parts of the company. In our example company, sheets submitted to the CEO have to be one-page, and the marketing department has made a rule to review any approval requests within 3 days. In SharePoint, this is comparable to setting different values when a workflow is applied to a list. This way, items can share common values within the list but not outside the list even though the workflow can be associated with any list in a site.

All SharePoint Designer created workflows will display initiation forms to users for setting parameters when the workflow initiates, which is why it is named ‘initiation parameter’. Reusable workflows provide one additional starting form and parameter when it is associated with a list, which is called the ‘association parameter’. The parameters can be displayed at the association time and the initiation time, these parameters at initiation time show values preset at the association time even though they are editable.

For now, let’s say that list workflows and site workflows have only initiation parameters, while reusable workflows have initiation parameters, association parameters, and parameters included at both times.

In case you are confused what initiation and association are, here are some brief examples.

When you click on an item in a list,

Edit item view pops up, the “Workflows” button is selectable there

Then another layer pops up with the workflow information that is controllable for the chosen item. When you choose a workflow to start, the form that comes up next is the initiation form. This is a list workflow or associated reusable workflow example, however the forms of site workflow or globally reusable workflows are also initiation forms.

On the contrary, association forms however, face users only when a reusable workflow is being associated.

Choosing “Add a Workflow” as shown above from a list,

Here, you are able to see the workflow association page. Select a workflow template and give each field an appropriate value, and click OK. The association form will then show up.

Note that initiation forms and association forms are not easily distinguishable by their looks!

“Introduction to designing and customizing workflows” describes workflow types and when to use them.

How to set parameters in order to receive user input

First step for setting input parameters is to find the “Initiation Form Parameters” button in the “Variables” section in the ribbon. Pressing it will pop up an “Association and Initiation Form Parameters” dialog.

Click on the “Add” button to insert a new parameter in “Add Field” dialog. The other buttons will be covered below.

As you can see, there are 4 fields which can be filled, “Field name”, “Description”, “Information type” and “Collect from parameter during”.

Field name and description will be displayed as strings to users and have no impact functionally, where any texts can be inserted. I recommend you to fill in the fields with descriptive expressions.

Information type is a predefined set of data types that are part of the initiation and association data. The value here can be:

· Single line of text

· Multiple lines of text

· Number (1, 1.0, 100)

· Date and Time

· Choice (menu to choose from)

· Yes/No (check box)

· Person or Group

· Hyperlink or Picture

· Assignment Stages

Last but not least, the last field asks when its data should be set. The value here can be “Initiation (starting the workflow)”, “Association (attaching to a list)” or both. This field does not exist on the dialog opened from a List, Site, or Globally Reusable workflow since its data can only be set during initiation.

You can set the initial value for this field or leave it blank on the next page and complete this section.

What happens if you add one initiation parameter as shown above?

A new field has just emerged. There are 3 values for “Show on Form”, these values are “Initiation”, “Association”, and “Both”. These options pertain to what is chosen in the “collect from parameter during” field. You can add another parameter by the “Add” button. Selecting a field will enable the “Modify” and the “Remove” buttons. The “Modify” button will open the “Modify Field” dialog which is exactly the same as the “Add Field” dialog but with the values preset to what you initially added. The “Remove” button will erase the field selected. When there are at least two or more fields in the dialog and if you select a field the “Move” buttons will become enabled and let you adjust the order of the fields. Changing the order here will directly make the same changes in the starting forms which are automatically built and also modifiable.

“Workflow Association and Initiation Forms (SharePoint Foundation)” gives you technical information with regard to forms.

This is the default form made by SharePoint Designer, which is displayable and modifiable by InfoPath. You can also take it as a preview of what users will see during the workflow instance initiation.

As you can see, the field name and the description are explicitly displayed in the default form. “Start” and “Cancel” buttons are used to confirm and call off an initiation of the given workflow instance, respectively.

Details on every field type

Listed here are all the possible starting parameter type instances in a page. Currently 10 types are supported as the starting parameter although there are more variable types in SharePoint Designer.

Each type can have a default value, description, and other restrictions such as valid input range. Moreover, the automated initial form is customizable with InfoPath with which you can modify the text, image and layout.

1) Single line of text

The “Single line of text” is a field to receive one line of string. Default value can be set from the dialog above, which will be displayed in a line. Although the character limit for this field is quite long, I recommend you to use “Multiple lines of text” field instead of this if the string cannot fit on one line.

2) Multiple lines of text

This is for receiving long strings. The “Single line of text” and the “Multiple lines of text” are visually different, but treated as the same SharePoint Designer string variable type.

3) Number

The “Number” field is able to receive a number as a ‘double’ type. This means that not only can integers and positive number be accepted, but fractional values and negative values can also be injected. A default value can be set or left blank. You can also set minimum or maximum values for this field to prevent users from entering numbers that are too small or too large.

4) Date and Time

The “Date and Time” type has few options to aid you in setting appropriate values. First of all, you can choose the value type between “Date only” and “Date and Time”. If “Date only” is chosen here, only date values will be displayed and modifiable on the form, while both date and time will be available for “Date and Time”.

The very bottom check box option restricts user input values to be no earlier than the moment the form is opened. This is beneficial in many real scenarios to avoid mistakes. For instance, when it comes to setting approval deadlines or vacation dates, usually the date and time have to be a date or time in the future.

Of course, initial values can also be set for data and time to guide users. Today’s date and current time are also given as options.

5) Choice

The “Choice” type allows you to use dropdown menus. Each choice has to be written as a line of text, and a default value can be set or left empty.

For the text-based designer’s sake, it provides an option to separate the text displayed on the form and the string value being used during design time within SharePoint Designer text-based designer. If a vertical bar is inserted into a line, the left string will become the value within the text-based designer, while the other side will be shown during the initiation and association.

6) Yes/No

This provides a check box to users when the workflow starts. The only thing to set is the default value.

7) Person or Group

The “Show Field” option can be ignored for now, since every time a user or group is selected, the user or group will always be shown via their display name. Not allowing blank values can force users to select at least one person or group to complete the given form and proceed.

You can decide whether to allow groups to be selected or not. It is also possible to limit which SharePoint Groups can be used to pick a person or group. Choosing “All Users” will allow users to pick from all accessible sources.

“People and Groups” should be selected and “Allow multiple values” must be checked in order to receive the user input above.

8) Hyperlink

You can decide if you would like the URL to be displayed as a “Hyperlink” or a static “Picture”.

This option will inject a button and a text based hyperlink into the target form. After clicking on this option, users will need to specify the URL and its description. For example, if you put “http://microsoft.com” and “Microsoft” respectively, this part of the form will become as below.

The link is already set to link to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx. The user can still modify the link by clicking on the button on the left side.

9) Picture

You can decide if you would like the URL to be displayed as a “Hyperlink” or a static “Picture”.

A picture can be set with a URL and a description just the same as a hyperlink. This will inserts the target picture into the form right away, which can be replaced by clicking on it and writing another URL. The description is shown when the cursor is hovered above the picture. The picture above shows an example of this where the “SPD blog” text is the description.

10) Assignment Stages

The “Assignment Stages” is useful only in the Office Task. Be sure not to take advantage of this parameter without the Office Task.

The “Assignment Stages” is unusual in a couple of aspects. It cannot be referenced from the text-based designer unless it is inherent from an Approval workflow, and it can expand stages dynamically. Each stage is a combination of the people picker and an assignment order type, either serial or parallel.

The concept of the “Assignment Stages” is a very complicated but powerful component which I won’t be able to fully explain in this one post. But I plan on making another blog post just on the Office Task soon, in which I will be able to talk further about this concept.

Summary

The starting parameters are used for receiving user input to workflows. There are two type of starting parameters, the initiation parameters and the association parameters. You can set ten types of starting parameters according to the scenario you are you using your workflows for. Each type of parameters has useful options to guide end users.

If you wish to know more about making and using the initiation parameters, “Create a workflow initiation form” office support document has a decent explanation. But please note that the document is for SharePoint Designer 2007 and is hence outdated.

In part 2, I will depict how to use the parameters received at designing workflows.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to read this blog posting. I hope it was helpful to you.

Please feel free to leave comments below.

Regards,

Chong Youn (John) Choe

Creating a SharePoint 2010 Workflow using SPD 2010 and Visio 2010: How-To & FAQ

spdblog — Thu, 19 May 2011 02:32:20 GMT

Hello all, my name is Sam Chung and I’m a PM on the SharePoint Designer team. In this blog I’m going to talk about how you can use Visio 2010 and SPD 2010 together to create workflows. In addition, I’m going to touch base on some common issues and questions people run into when using the two tools together.

To set the stage we need some context regarding the relationship between SPD and Visio. There are already a number of resources out there regarding how you can use the two together. In particular the follow blog entries describe this from Visio’s side:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visio/archive/2009/11/23/sharepoint-workflow-authoring-in-visio-premium-2010-part-1.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visio/archive/2010/01/19/sharepoint-workflow-authoring-in-visio-premium-2010-part-2.aspx#comments

However, as the above blog posts are quite dated, I’ve decided to bring a fresher relook at using the two together. In addition, I will be diving a bit deeper into some areas, and going over some common issues people have already been hitting.

Background

For this blog I’m going to assume you haven’t seen any previous information relating Visio and SPD, and as such, I’m going to set some background. If you’re already fairly familiar Visio and SPD I’d suggest you skip this section and move onto the next sections.

The SharePoint Designer 2010 team has partnered with Visio to allow users the ability to use the two tools together in creating and viewing workflows. This blog will focus more on the creation piece of the partnership and will not touch too much on the server side visualization (let’s leave some stuff for another blog).

The creation of a workflow can now happen in two ways. Users can use the regular sentence based designer within SPD to create/edit workflows, or they can use Visio client. Since the creation of workflows within the Sentence based designer is something that is fairly well known, I’m going to concentrate on how users can use Visio Client to create and edit workflows.

**NOTE** You need to have Visio 2010 Premium to be able to do this. In addition, SPD 2010 and Visio 2010 must be installed together on the same machine

This partnership was created to help those who are more comfortable with Visio to be able to use a more familiar design surface. At the same time, the Visio design surface offers a very unique view of the workflow that many users may find useful when designing/reviewing workflows. Although the entire workflow cannot be created in Visio, users are still able to create the overall “flow” of the workflow and then finish setting the parameters within SPD.

Creating a Workflow Diagram in Visio

1. Start Visio 2010 Premium

2. Create a new Diagram

3. Under Template Categories, select “Flowchart”.

4. Then select Microsoft SharePoint Workflow

5. Press the Create button found on the right side.

***Note*** There is no difference between selecting US Units or Metric Units. Both will create the same workflow diagram.

6. You will be presented with a blank canvas. Before you start, you should know that you need to insert the Start Shape and End Shape.

· All SharePoint workflows need to have these shapes.

· All of the workflow shapes you add need to be inserted between these two shapes.

7. All of the workflow shapes have been organized into categories within the stencil pane.

· Quick Shapes – contain the shapes that are placed in the “top portion” within each of the different categories.

***Note*** Quick shapes are a great way of speeding up the workflow creation process. Every category within the stencil has a quick shapes section. For example, if you look the SharePoint Workflow Actions category, you’ll see how there’s a thin line separating the top set of actions from the bottom set of actions.

The actions located at the top are the “Quick Shapes” for that category. Quick Shapes are not automatically selected based off usage or anything like that. Instead, the shapes in this section are simply user settable. Go ahead and click and drag any shape you want above the line and that shape will become part of the quick shapes list. You can then use these shapes to help create your diagram a lot quicker. The top four quick shapes will appear as ghosted option on shapes within the canvas. (Simply mouse over the light blue arrow heads on the side of any shape to see this)

· SharePoint Workflow Actions (XXX units) – is where all of the SharePoint Workflow actions are stored

· SharePoint Workflow Conditions (XXX units) – is where all of the SharePoint Workflow conditions are stored

· SharePoint Workflow Terminators (XXX units) – is where you will find the Start and End workflow shapes that I described in step 6

***Note*** The SharePoint Workflow Actions shown in the stencil pane are not filtered based off the type of workflow you would like to create. Normally, when you create a workflow in SPD, the list of actions you are presented with is filtered to just the set of actions that are relevant to the type of workflow you are creating. So if you are creating a List workflow you will only see list workflow actions, this is the same for the site workflows and reusable workflows. However, in Visio client there is no filtering on the list of actions made available to you. As such, when creating workflows using Visio, you will need to make sure that you only use actions that are relevant for the type of workflow you are creating.

In addition, none of the site workflow specific actions are available here. As such, you will not be able to create Site Workflows using Visio Client. During Import you will notice that there is no option to create site workflows based off a Visio Diagram.

8. Go ahead now and add the shapes you’d like and create your workflow. For this blog I have created a very simple example.

***Note*** Don’t forget to set the Yes/No options on all conditional shapes. A quick way to do this is to just right click on any of the connectors coming out of a conditional shape and select “yes” or “no”.

Exporting / Importing between Visio and SPD

By this point you are trying to get your Visio Diagram from Visio to SPD. The next couple sections will cover the best ways to do this.

Going from Visio to SPD

1. Once you have created your diagram and you’re ready to send it to SPD you need to first press the “Export” button

· This button is found in the “Process” tab

2. If there are errors within your diagram they will appear in the error pane.

***Note*** Visio at this point in time is checking to make sure that the diagram you are trying to send to SPD is a diagram that can be converted directly into a workflow. But it is only checking between the start and end shapes. Everywhere else is fair game for you to place whatever Visio shapes you may want. Just make sure that everything between the Start and End shape are workflow shapes, and that they are connected properly.

3. Assuming the validation passed (if it didn’t pass, and you have errors, go fix the error first and then come back) you’ll be presented with an Export Workflow dialog where you can specify where you want the VWI file saved. Select a location, name your file and press Save (I called mine “Simple Workflow” and saved it on the desktop).

***Note*** The VWI you are saving represents an Open XML file, basically a zip file, that contains several other files within it. You can go ahead and use your favorite zip program to unzip the file and take a look at what files exist within it. But generally, you will find the following files:

[content_types].xml

Workflow.vdx

Workflow.xoml

Workflow.xoml.rules

In general, the ones you will care most about are the .vdx file and the .xoml files. The vdx file is the Visio diagram you just created. And the .xoml files represent the actual workflow xoml that would be run once the workflow is published. Right now, the .xoml files won’t have much in them because this workflow hasn’t been properly configured yet in SPD. But once we finish configuring this workflow and if we were to export out the workflow again from SPD you would see a lot more info in the .xoml files. You’d also see a workflow.config file that outlines additional details regarding the workflow. For now, let’s not mess with these files and just move on to the next step.

If you would like to learn more about Open XML files, please refer to the following link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205(v=office.12).aspx

4. Now let’s go ahead and Import in that VWI file into SPD. Open up SPD, and connect to your most favorite SharePoint 2010 site.

5. Next click on the Workflow Link found on the left navigation bar

6. Next go to the ribbon and press the “Import from Visio” button

7. This will bring up the Import Wizard. Go ahead and first select your VWI file, and press the next button

8. Give your workflow a name and select what type of workflow it is.

9. If everything has gone correctly you should see something like below:

Modifying the Workflow

1. You can now go ahead and start setting the parameters for each of the actions within the workflow. Once you’re done, your workflow might look something like below:

2. Now before you publish, let’s add another action to the workflow. I inserted a simple log to history action to the end of my workflow.

***Note*** Now this is a really important note. If you’re going to be adding/deleting/moving actions within your workflow, there is a very good chance that the diagram you initially started out will NOT look the same when you view it in the server side visualization. This is because when you modify action locations within SPD, the Visio Add-on inside of SPD needs to dynamically recreate the diagram and relay out the entire diagram. This means that things might look different from what you would have expected. As such, if the server side visualization is important to you, you should:

a) First Export the workflow from SPD back to Visio

b) Fix the diagram

c) Export out from Visio to SPD

d) Republish the workflow (without modifying it again in SPD)

3. Go ahead now and publish your newly created workflow.

Conclusion

Well there you have it, a quick and tightly integrated experience going from Visio to SPD. Hopefully this has been of some use to you. I’ve gone and consolidated the notes from above into a FAQ / Tips section below.

Please feel free to post questions below. I’ll try and respond to the questions as much as possible.

In addition, hopefully in the next couple weeks I will create another short follow up blog post describing in detail the experience of going from SPD to Visio, along with issues that can arise when trying to update an already existing workflow with a Visio diagram.

Thank you everyone for reading.

Sam

FAQ And Tips & Tricks

1. You need to have Visio 2010 Premium to be able to create SharePoint 2010 workflows. In addition, SPD 2010 and Visio 2010 must be installed together on the same machine

2. When creating a new Visio SharePoint 2010 Workflow Diagram, there is no difference between selecting US Units or Metric Units. Both will create the same workflow diagram.

3. Quick shapes are a great way of speeding up the workflow creation process. Every category within the stencil has a quick shapes section. For example, if you look the SharePoint Workflow Actions category, you’ll see how there’s a thin line separating the top set of actions from the bottom set of actions.

4. The SharePoint Workflow Actions shown in the stencil pane are not filtered based off the type of workflow you would like to create. Normally, when you create a workflow in SPD, the list of actions you are presented with is filtered to just the set of actions that are relevant to the type of workflow you are creating. So if you are creating a List workflow you will only see list workflow actions, this is the same for the site workflows and reusable workflows. However, in Visio client there is no filtering on the list of actions made available to you. As such, when creating workflows using Visio, you will need to make sure that you only use actions that are relevant for the type of workflow you are creating.

5. In addition, none of the site workflow specific actions are available here. As such, you will not be able to create Site Workflows using Visio Client. During Import you will notice that there is no option to create site workflows based off a Visio Diagram.

6. Don’t forget to set the Yes/No options on all conditional shapes. A quick way to do this is to just right click on any of the connectors coming out of conditional shape and select “yes” or “no”.

7. When trying to export out a diagram from Visio, Visio is checking to make sure that the diagram you are trying to send to SPD is a diagram that can be converted directly into a workflow. But it is only checking between the start and end shapes. Everywhere else is fair game for you to place whatever Visio shapes you may want. Just make sure that everything between the Start and End shape are workflow shapes, and that they are connected properly.

8. The VWI you are saving represents an Open XML file, basically a zip file, that contains several other files within it. You can go ahead and use your favorite zip program to unzip the file and take a look at what files exist within it. But generally, you will find the following files:

[content_types].xml

Workflow.vdx

Workflow.xoml

Workflow.xoml.rules

In general, you will care most about the .vdx file and the .xoml files. The vdx file is the Visio diagram you just created. And the .xoml files represent the actual workflow xoml that would be run once the workflow is published. The .xoml files won’t have much in them when exported from a new Visio diagram; this is because this workflow hasn’t been properly configured yet in SPD. But once you finish configuring this workflow and if you were to export out the workflow again from SPD you would see a lot more info in the .xoml files. You’d also see a workflow.config file that outlines additional details regarding the workflow.

If you would like to learn more about Open XML files, please refer to the following link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205(v=office.12).aspx

9. If you’re going to be adding/deleting/moving actions within your workflow, there is a very good chance that the diagram you initially started out will NOT look the same when you view it in the server side visualization. This is because when you modify action locations within SPD, the Visio Add-on inside of SPD needs to dynamically recreate the diagram and relay out the entire diagram. This means that things might look different from what you would have expected. As such, if the server side visualization is important to you, you should:

a) First Export the workflow from SPD back to Visio

b) Fix the diagram

c) Export out from Visio to SPD

d) Republish the workflow (without modifying it again in SPD)

Association Columns

spdblog — Mon, 02 May 2011 02:34:09 GMT

Hello, there. I’m JongHwa Lim, a PM in the SharePoint Designer team. Long time no see. Some people might have considered this site dead because there have been no new posts since April of last year but we are back. We will keep this site alive and will post new blogs at least every month and try to keep connected to readers and customers.

To warm this site up (and also warm my team up for upcoming posts), let’s start with a small but very useful feature new in SharePoint Designer 2010 (aka. SPD).

When do we need association columns

Let’s first start off by setting a scenario. You are a workflow author who is used to using SPD and you are required to make a workflow that should be used in many lists or document libraries with some workflow-specific fields. How do you implement it? Here are some examples of choices you might try to achieve this goal.

· List workflow

o You can start from list workflows. You will add the workflow specific fields to the list directly. And during design time in SharePoint Designer, you can see the fields and create your workflow logic using those fields.

o But when it comes to reusing this workflow in other lists or doc libraries, you don’t have good answer for it.

· Reusable workflow

o You are a little bit more familiar with SPD workflows so you choose to go with reusable workflow which will resolve the reuse issue. But as you open the workflow designer, you end up seeing only ‘Title’ for settable field and seeing ‘Content Type’, ‘Created’, ‘Created By’, ‘ID’, ‘Modified’, ‘Modified By’ and ‘Title’ for readable fields.

o You cannot use the fields you need to make the workflow logic.

· Reusable workflow with base content type

o You are an advanced user of SPD workflow so you know the concept of base content type for reusable workflow.

o First, you create a new content type and add the necessary fields to the content type. And in the ‘Create Reusable Workflow’ dialog, designate the content type you created as the base content type.

o Now you can see the fields in the workflow designer and you can achieve what you are required to do. This has no issue with reuse scenario as long as you associate this workflow with the content type and the content type is added to the list or document library.

o But what if you found out you need a new field? Every time you need a new field, you have to go to site content type or the site column UI either on the server or on SPD.

o Another weakness still exists. When you want to move your workflow using ‘Save as Template’, the unpackaged workflow will lose some information on the base content type if the base content type is a custom content type or the content type contains a custom site column.

· Reusable workflow with association column

o You are almost as familiar with SPD as the one who knows base content type concept. So you know the concept of association column.

o As you start authoring the workflow, when you need a field, you just create it right away with association columns, where you can choose between an existing site column and a new one. You don’t go back-and-forth all the way among workflow designer, site content type, and site column UIs. You can do everything in one place and that’s it.

o In addition, there is no issue with reuse because reusable workflow definitions carry the fields with it and workflow package supports it.

What is Association Column

Now, some of you may have tried to find help files on this topic. Here are some examples of what can be found:

· Reusable workflows, by default, don’t have the context of a specific list or library. Therefore, by default, they provide only the columns that are common across lists and libraries, such as Created and Created By.
If your reusable workflow requires certain columns to be present in the list or library that you associated it to, you can add those columns as association columns. Association columns get added automatically to a list or library when a reusable workflow is associated to that list or library.

· Association columns
If your reusable workflow requires certain columns to be present in the list or library that it is associated to, you can add those columns as association columns. Association columns get added automatically to a list or library when a reusable workflow is associated to that list or library.

· (Tooltip of Ribbon button)
Define columns that will be added to a list when the workflow is associated with that list. This option is unavailable for site workflows.

All these descriptions are completely true and perfectly explain what association columns are and what it is for. Association columns were introduced by because of the real world scenario that there is no good experience for reusable workflow authors when they want to update the fields of the ‘current item’. As we didn’t have a ‘reusable workflow’ concept until SharePoint Designer 2010, we didn’t have association columns, either. Without association columns, the only alternative may have been to use base content type. But, this also put various limitations in terms of association and design time UX because it could only be associated to the base content type or inherited content types and the author should go from workflow designer to site content type or site column UIs several times.

How to create an association column

Creating an association column is straight forward. I will show you with an example. As shown below, you can start with the Ribbon button named ‘Association Columns’.

If you click on it, a warning dialog will pop up like below.

If you select ‘OK’, you will be directed to the main dialog for association column.

You can choose from ‘Select Site Column’ and ‘Add New Column’. If you select site column, the following dialog will be presented.

If you select Address field, it will be added to the main dialog.

If you add new column, following UI will be shown where you can define a new column.

In this example, I’ve created a multi-line text field named ‘Comments from Approvers’.

You can see that when a new column is selected, Modify is also enabled but it will be disabled for any existing columns.

If you click ‘OK’, you are done with the association column. Now you can see ‘Address’ and ‘Comments from Approvers’ in the designer surface.

How it works

Internally, association column is using site column so that’s why you can see option ‘Select Site Column…’ button in the UI. The association columns whether it is newly created or chosen from site columns are persisted in the wfconfig file so that it can be used during design time.

But if you look at the wfconfig before you publish the workflow, you can find the following field definition. This is because we create site columns during publishing time and update the corresponding field definition in the wfconfig.

So if you revisit the association column dialog after publish, you can see the difference that ‘New Column’ changed to ‘Existing Column’ and you are not allowed to modify it.

And when the reusable workflow is associated to the list or document library, we add the association columns to the list and document library so that the reusable workflow referencing the fields work just fine.

Packaging

If you package the reusable workflow and un-package it in another site, the association columns are kept, meaning that association columns are also packaged and unpackaged. On the other hand, custom base content type and custom site column in the base content type are not fully packaged, meaning that there could be information lost during the transfer.

Limit

When we associate a reusable workflow to a content type, the association columns are added to the list or document library when the content type is added to the list or document library. We do not add the association columns directly to the content type.

SharePoint Designer Blog Updates

spdblog — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 06:42:00 GMT

Hello All,

My name is Sam Chung, and I'm a PM on the SharePoint Designer team. I just wanted to let everyone know that we're bringing back to life this blog and that we will be posting new entries in the upcoming weeks. There have been quite a few changes within the SPD team and these changes have made it so that we weren't able to give this blog the attention it needed up until now.

We currently have a list of topic ideas that we're reviewing to see which topic to write about. But if anyone has any blog topics that they'd love to see right away, please feel free to post it in the comments below. We will review the comment topics with our list and prioritize our blog postings accordingly.

Thank you to everyone who has continued to return to this blog hoping for updates. We apologize for the lack of updates but the blog is back now. And there will be updates soon. :)

Sam

SharePoint Designer 2010 RTM

spdblog — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 06:32:00 GMT

It's here! To keep this brief - we're pleased to announce the availability of SharePoint Designer 2010, along with the release of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Download it now for free using the following links: 32 bit, 64 bit. Enjoy!

Working with the SharePoint Theming Engine

spdblog — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 22:29:00 GMT

Hi, Kolby here again. As we get closer to releasing SharePoint 2010, I’m getting more and more excited about our product and some of the new functionality we’ve added in 2010. I’m particularly looking forward to theming capabilities that the SharePoint team has added this release. Last week I learned how to set up a CSS file for theming a master page in SharePoint Designer 2010, and I thought, “People need to see this!”

What are the theming possibilities?

The theming engine works on CSS files, and can do the following (token name in italics):

Replace colors (such as a background or font color) - ReplaceColor
Replace fonts – ReplaceFont
Recolor images (using one of three methods: tint, blend, and fill)- RecolorImage

Through the browser UI, you can select an out-of-the-box Site Theme or with SharePoint Server (SPS), create a new one by picking 12 colors and 2 fonts. These values are stored in a THMX file, a standard that’s also used by Microsoft Office. You can also build a theme in Microsoft PowerPoint and save it as a THMX file to use in SharePoint. The THMX files are stored in the Theme Gallery in your root site, and you can add themes via SPD or the browser Site Settings > Themes gallery). The twelve theme colors are represented by the tokens:

Dark1, Dark2
Light1, Light2
Accent1, Accent2, Accent3, Accent4, Accent5, Accent6
Hyperlink
Followed Hyperlink

The theming engine works with these colors and produces 5 additional permutations of each: Lightest, Lighter, Medium, Darker, and Darkest. To reference a permutation in the CSS file use the format: Color-Permutation (“Light2-Darkest” for example).

Syntax

The theming engine works by reading comments in your CSS file. For a themed style, define a default choice, and place a theming token directly before the style. Here’s an example: I have a background-color element that I want to be themed to Light2-Darkest. My definition in the CSS would look like this:

/* [ReplaceColor(themeColor:"Light2-Darkest")] */ background-color:#707070;

In the default theme, the background will appear as #707070, but when a theme is applied, the background color will be replaced with Light2-Darkest. For examples of how to use the other tokens, see the end of this article or look at the default CSS file for v4.master (corev4.css), which is a great reference.

File Setup

To set up a master page with theming capability, you must do two things:

Place the CSS file in a location where the engine will see it.
Register the CSS file correctly in the master page.

Location

The theming engine will run on CSS files only if they’re placed in the correct place. For our customizations we’ll use the RootSite/Style Library/~language/Themable folder. This folder will exist for SPS sites with the SharePoint Server Publishing feature activated. If you’re working in a root site without this structure, all you need is a folder named “Style Library” at the root site with a folder named “Themable” inside it. Any content within the Themable folder will be seen by the theming engine (including content within subfolders). Recreate this folder structure in SharePoint Designer or through the browser. The language folder is optional, but if you want different CSS files for different languages, then you will need it. For English, name the folder en-us.

Images do not need to be placed in a specific location, but the suggested place is a RootSite/Style Library/Images folder.

A couple hints about the recoloring images. If you recolor an image that is rendered in multiple locations, the last recoloring performed on the image will be used in all themed locations. For example, I wanted to show different recolor methods on the same image (tinting, blending, and filling), but they all showed up filled. I had to save individual copies of the image and theme them differently (note: a last resort alternative is to use a detach attribute to tell the engine to create a new image when recoloring it, but this method should be used sparingly due to the performance reasons of downloading the multiple image copies during rendering. For that reason I will not go into detail here). For image clusters (a single file that contains more than one image), you can recolor portions of the image using the includeRectangle parameter (look at corev4.css for an example of how to do this).

Registration

For the themed CSS files to be applied to our master page, we need to register the CSS file instead of just linking it. This will point the master page to the themed CSS file when a theme is applied. Place the following parameter in the master page head tag:

<SharePoint:CssRegistration name="<% $SPUrl:~sitecollection/Style Library/~language/ Themable /myStyleSheet.css %>" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/>

The After parameter ensures that our themed CSS file is applied to the page after corev4.css. Do note, however, that the <% $SPUrl token will not resolve in SharePoint Foundation (SPF). In SPF, you will need to specify the location using a hard coded URL. Unfortunately this will be limiting if you want to use different CSS files for different languages (since you won’t have a ~language token).

Demo

All right, we should now be set up with our “themable” CSS file. Draft up a slick looking master page and try it out. To get a better understanding of the color pallet that I’ll end up with my themes, I built into v4.master a large table showing all of the color permutations. I also included a sample image and tried out recoloring it. Below is what my creation looks like with the default color scheme (notice, I used white as the default settings for the background-color styles.

Next, I jump into the browser and pick a new Site Theme, how about Convention with Papyrus and Segoe Script as fonts. Now I’m greeted with a much more colorful table (see below). I themed the hyperlink texts and the image labels. For the recoloring, I used Dark2-Lightest (you can see the perfect color match between the Dark2-Lightest cell and the logo recolored with the filling method).

Example Code

Here’s an example piece of the CSS for the second logo image for which I themed the font, font color, and image color:

/* [ReplaceFont(themeFont: "MinorFont")] */ font-family:Verdana;
/* [ReplaceColor(themeColor:"Dark2-Darker")] */ color:black;
/* [RecolorImage(themeColor:"Dark2-Lightest",method:"Tinting")] */ background:url("/Style Library/images/spdicon1.png") no-repeat;

I’m actually quite amazed with the quality of image recoloring. If used correctly and stylistically, the SharePoint theming engine can really delight those of us that care about looks as well as functionality :)

Thanks for reading, and I hope you find the new SharePoint theming engine as exciting and useful as I have.

Managing SharePoint Designer 2010 Video

spdblog — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:48:00 GMT

Want to learn more about how to control SPD 2010 usage across your SharePoint sites? Check out this video tutorial for managing SharePoint Designer to get a comprehensive rundown. For more helpful tips and tricks, please also visit the Get the Point blog or their YouTube channel. Enjoy!

SharePoint Designer’s new workflow editor: keyboard shortcuts

spdblog — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:08:54 GMT

Travis here again from the SharePoint Designer development team. In my last post, I introduced you to a few of the new features of the workflow editor in SharePoint Designer 2010. This time, I’d like to show some of the new keyboard features in the editor that can make you more productive if you’re the sort of person who would rather avoid using the mouse unless it’s necessary.

If you’d like, open the sample workflow you were building in my last post, or create a new one. It doesn’t really matter. Note that as you move your mouse cursor around on the page, various things light up. Before and after each action, condition, and step are orange insertion points that light up. If you click there, you’ll put your cursor there and then can insert things at that location. Try clicking on an insertion point now.

A variety of common keyboard commands all work in the new workflow editor. For example, you can use the cursor keys to move the insertion point around the document, or Shift+Up to select the object above your current insertion point, or Delete to delete the object that is currently selected, Home and End to get to the beginning or end of the object that contains the insertion point (such as a step), or Ctrl+Home or Ctrl+End to get to the beginning or end of the entire workflow. (Those are just examples; there are more.)

You can also insert things without using the mouse. Like all other ribbons in your favorite Office apps, you can use the keyboard to navigate the ribbon. Press Alt, then W for the Workflow tab, then T for Action. Choose an action from the list using the keyboard and press Enter to insert it. You can then use Tab and Shift+Tab to cycle through the hyperlinks in your action. It works, but it’s not very fast.

SharePoint Designer 2010 has a much faster way of inserting things once you know the name of the action or condition you want, such as “Log to History List” or “Send an Email.” Try this: click inside an empty step to move the insertion point there. Then, start typing “log to”—right there at the cursor. The cursor will expand into a search box, and tell you how many things match what you just typed.

Eventually, you’ll see a checkmark icon and the text “Press Enter to insert Log to History List.” Do just that, and watch the search box disappear and the Log to History List action take its place. This works for all actions and conditions, as well as the other things in the Insert group on the ribbon, such as steps and else-if branches. Once you remember the names of things you want to insert, using this search box is a very fast way to add new things to your workflow—inserting Log to History List only actually takes three keypresses: L, O, and Enter. If you don't remember the name of an action or condition, but remember that it includes the word “send,” you can type “send” into the search box and press Enter to see a list of everything that matches that word. Choose the one you want and press Enter again to insert it.

The ribbon and this new search box can help you find features that have been around for a while that you didn’t even know existed. For example, did you know that in SharePoint Designer 2007 you can set multiple actions to run in parallel, so that the server won't wait for the first action to finish before it starts on the second one? That can be especially useful if the first action involves requesting information from a person who’s really busy (or lazy). That feature was there in the last version but few people knew about it. You can do this easily in SharePoint Designer 2010 by inserting a Parallel Block and then putting actions inside of it. It’s right there on the ribbon, or just a few keypresses away.

These are just some of the enhancements we’ve made to the workflow editor in SharePoint Designer 2010. We hope that they’ll save you a lot of time and help you build even more powerful workflows to take advantage of new SharePoint features, in less time than you could before. We’d love to hear what you think, so please let us know in comments and the SharePoint Designer forums.

SharePoint Designer’s new workflow editor: introduction

spdblog — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:16:51 GMT

Hi everybody, I’m Travis from the SharePoint Designer development team. Hopefully by now some of you have been able to download and evaluate the beta for SharePoint and SharePoint Designer 2010. (If you haven’t, consider this a sneak preview for the upcoming release.) SharePoint Designer 2010 has a brand new workflow editor. If you’ve used SharePoint Designer workflows in the past, the new editor might seem a bit overwhelming at first, but we’re confident that once you get used to it you’ll really appreciate the new features. These new tools give you more power and expressiveness in your workflows, and let you build them even faster than before.

For the purposes of this tour, I’m assuming that you have at least a little experience building workflows with SharePoint Designer. If you’d like to learn more about SharePoint workflows, check out the introductory content on Office Online.

Let’s take a look. First, create or open a site in SharePoint Designer. (SharePoint Designer 2010 only works against SharePoint 2010 servers, so you’ll need to have a test server up and running to follow along.) Once your site is opened, you’ll see the new site settings page, along with the ribbon, also new for this version. SharePoint Designer 2010 lets you create more types of workflows than before. In addition to a List Workflow, a workflow attached to a list just like you could create in the 2007 version, you can also create Reusable Workflows that can be used on multiple lists or content types, and Site Workflows that don’t use a list at all. (To see more options for creating workflows, check out the Workflows page by using the navigation pane on the left.) For now, let’s create a regular list workflow. Click the List Workflow button on the ribbon and then choose a list to attach it to from the dropdown list, such as Announcements. You’ll be asked to name your workflow, so give it a memorable name (I suggest “foofles”) and press Enter to create the workflow.

After you do that, you’ll be immediately taken to the new workflow editor. If you have any experience with the old one at all, you’ll notice that the new one is strikingly different. First off, like just about everything else in the new SharePoint Designer, it lives in a tab, so you can switch to other tabs, do other stuff, and then come back and continue working without having to save or close. You may also remember that the old workflow designer showed you one step of your workflow at a time, but the new one shows you your entire workflow at once. With a new workflow you should see a single box called “Step 1,” and a blinking orange cursor that I have lovingly named “Hypnocursor.” (That name didn’t really catch on.)

A workflow isn’t that useful with no actions in it. So, to insert your first action, click the Actions button on the ribbon to drop down the actions gallery. (Tip: If the Actions button isn’t enabled, it’s because your insertion point isn’t in a place where you can insert an action. Click in the middle of Step 1 and the Actions button should light up again. Clicking the edges of the step will select the whole thing, which isn’t what you want.) You’ll see your old favorite actions in the Actions list, as well as a host of new actions that we’ve added in this release. Go ahead and choose an action from the list to insert it. Now things should be pretty familiar—you get a sentence with little blue links that you can click to fill in the blanks. When you click links, things work mostly as they did in the last version, though the rest of the workflow team has been hard at work adding a bunch of new features that are a little out of the scope of this tour.

To insert your first condition, click the Conditions button on the ribbon to see the conditions gallery. Choose a condition and insert it. (You may notice that the top two conditions have been renamed—for example, “Compare any data source” is now called “If any value equals value.”) Whoa—inserting a condition adds a big new block to the editor, and you’ll notice that the condition is after the action you already inserted. This isn’t a mistake. The new workflow editor lets you have multiple conditional blocks, each with their own set of branches, in each step. They can be one after another, or you can even put conditional blocks inside of other branches. Actions inside of a branch will only happen if the conditions of the branch are met, just like before. If you put actions before or after a conditional block (a series of connected branches with conditions), those will happen before or after the actions that execute conditionally. To do that in SharePoint Designer 2007 would have required several steps, but you can do it all in the same step now if you want.

But, we want the action to happen only if it meets the condition we just created, and it’s easy to fix this. Just click on your action (anywhere except for a hyperlink) to select it. Then, use the Move Up and Move Down buttons on the ribbon to move it into the conditional branch. It will get indented so it’s easy to tell which branch it belongs to. You can even use Move Up and Move Down to move actions from one step to another.

It doesn’t stop at just moving actions, though. Let’s go ahead and add a new step to the workflow. Click in the space below Step 1 to move your cursor down there. Then, click Step on the ribbon to add a new one. Now, you can select that whole conditional block you created. When you move your cursor over the block, notice that you get a rectangle highlight over the branch and block. You can click on the thick bar to the left of the block to select the whole thing.

Once the block is selected, you can use the same Move Up and Move down buttons to move the whole block into the next step!

There’s one more time-saving feature that I’d like to show you today, and that’s the ability to save a nonfunctional draft of your workflow. In the old workflow dialog, you’d click Finish to save your changes, which would upload a bunch of files to the server, compile them, verify them, and do a bunch of stuff that can sometimes take a long time. You can do that in the new editor too, using the Publish button on the ribbon. But when you’re first building your workflow, you don’t really need to compile it or build forms for it or any of that stuff. You don’t even want it to show up in the list of workflows for a list until it’s ready. So, we’ve added a regular Save command this time around. When you click Save on the Quick Access Toolbar in the upper-left corner (or press Ctrl+S or any other way you normally save things), your workflow files will still be saved on the server, but all of the other parts of the process will be skipped, so it doesn’t take nearly as long. When you’re finished with the first version of your workflow and are ready to deploy it, then you can use Publish to finalize it and make it live.

Well, this post is already getting long, so this seems like a good place to end it. Stay tuned for another post about the cool keyboarding features in our new workflow editor, coming shortly.

Overview of Human Workflow in SharePoint 2010

spdblog — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:15:00 GMT

Hi folks, Sean Gabriel here, Program Manager on the SPD workflow team. I recently presented a session on human workflow at SPC, and wanted to share out the core of the talk with a broader audience. We’ll also be following up with deep dives into the nuts and bolts of designing workflows in SharePoint 2010, so keep an eye out for upcoming posts. The product team has put a ton of work into the new and improved workflow capabilities of 2010, and we hope you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming release!

To help set the stage, let’s take a look at the world according to workflow (click for a larger view):

One of our big messages for the release is around providing a broad continuum for the workflow solutions you build, and this graph-like slide is meant to reflect that. The horizontal axis covers the tools you can work with, and the vertical axis is a rough scale of the workflow capabilities available at that level. The further along the curve you go, the more sophisticated your solution becomes.

Starting on the left, we’re continuing to deliver built-in approval based workflows in 2010, ready to associate out of the box. These are designed to help you track processes from start to finish by assigning out workflow tasks in the manner you specify, and they’re easily configured with settings like due dates using the browser UI. But this time around, we’ve built them up using the declarative workflow stack, and they make use of a number of platform enhancements like reusability, InfoPath forms, visualizations, and the task process designer.

What does that mean? In essence, the out-of-box approval is no longer a black box as far as customizations go; you can now use SharePoint Designer 2010 to the workflow directly to suit your business needs. (You can also easily make a copy to edit, or use the underlying task process in another workflow – more on this in a bit.) Changing the way tasks are assigned, editing the e-mail notifications that get sent out, or altering the set of fields on any of the workflow forms are some examples of the customizations now easily within reach. Look for a future post to dive deeper into the new workflow designer experience in SPD.

As you start digging into the out-of-box workflows using SPD, you’ll notice that the body of each is a variant of a “start an approval process” activity. That’s because at the heart of each approval workflow is a new declarative activity that we’ve internally named the ‘OfficeTask’, and it holds the core routing logic for each process. We found that a lot of processes, from informal content reviews to structured expense reporting, follow similar routing patterns but with a wide variety of behaviors specific to the different stages in the process. As such, we designed this enhanced activity with these key extensibility points in mind, while still preserving a common flow between stages.

Here’s a simplified diagram of what’s under the hood:

Without jumping into too many specifics, you’re able to change behaviors that apply either to the entire task hierarchy, or just to individual tasks that get assigned out, as well as manage the transitions between them. Each part of the process highlighted above is, in turn, a self-contained miniature designer within the overall workflow. We also light up some task-specific actions when you’re working in the various regions (some of our favorites are adding new tasks on the fly, delegating a task to someone else, or escalating it to a manager). The best way to learn is to try it out! Since the approval workflow uses this same infrastructure, you can inspect its logic in SPD and see how we’ve implemented common behaviors you’re already familiar with.

A quick word on tooling as well – while SharePoint Designer still employs a rules-based design experience for building and customizing workflows, you can now round trip your work through Visio and leverage the benefits of a graphical designer (complete with a stencil for all the SharePoint workflow actions!) to better visualize the overall flow. And when you need to move to a custom coded solution, you don’t need to lose all the great work you started with in SPD; Visual Studio now imports the declarative workflows that SPD generates, and you can quickly pick up where you left off.

In addition, we’ve done a lot of work to integrate with the sandboxed solution infrastructure in SharePoint so if you can contain your code needs to a simple activity, you can deploy and run that code as partially trusted within a larger declarative workflow. Our colleagues in the Business Connectivity Services team have started blogging about this and other cool extensibility points for workflow, like external list integration; if you’re itching to learn more now, check out a few of their posts here, here, and here.

That about sums up the 10,000 foot view – though there’s so much more to cover, and we also want to hear from you about what you’re most interested in seeing us write about here. Feel free to post your questions in comments, and looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Cheers,
Sean