Code Eater (Wael A. Kabli) : webServices

Business Process Automation, a story to tell

Wael A. Kabli — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:00:08 GMT

eFroms solution Components

The eForms solution is a result of collaborating the following components all together:

· Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Infrastructure.

· Form Site (Portal): a SharePoint Site that hosts the whole solution and enabling this kind of integration.

· Email: a mail services that will send notifications within the workflows.

· Forms Template: This is the from that contains the target process. This is were you usually take a paper form or a manual process analyze, break-down and make an e-form out of it. In this solution we use Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 in implement eForms or you can use APS.NET forms.

· Workflow: a component that is installed in the SharePoint that will contain the actual business process.

· Workflow Tasks: This is a SharePoint list that contains the tasks created by the workflow. A Task simply replaces a stage of a human task in the process (like an approval, signatures or a configuration).

· Security: to provide non-repudiation, data integrity and origin.

· Workflow History: This is a SharePoint list that stores the workflow logs. This includes cancellations, rejections, approvals and other workflow state transitions.

· Web Services: are set of services that will aid the solution in performing certain tasks such as getting user profiles from Active Directory and get the workflow logs to show a workflow history and maybe getting integrated with other services like Primavera for example.

· Other Lists: some forms depend on few SharePoint List to do some lookups on them.

· Archive: This is where the submitted form get stored which is basically a document or form library.

The flow of a workflow!

The story begins when a user find a link on the portal saying ( click here to fill XYZ form ). The link is actually pointing to the form template (which has the extension xsn) if you are using InfoPath. When he clicks on it, he will be redirected to the InfoPath Forms Server 2007 that is in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server2007 and it will render the form template (xsn) to be displayed on the web browser.

As soon as the form opens, the form had few rules inside it that will communicate with a web service to get the current user credentials from AD.

The user now will fill the form and submit which will actually will save this form in (XML) format in a document library or a form library for archiving.

As soon as this form is submitted, a workflow will run to follow the business process creating tasks to the people who are suppose to process that form (like a manager task to approve that form) and sending emails to the corresponding people to perform their tasks. the workflow will leave its foot prints on the history, so any time the user (or any body) can open the history and look what happened to the process, which task has been completed and what tasks are still pending.

The security model in SharePoint is taking care of who should see what and who can do something. Once the workflow is finished, it will indicate its state such as (Approved or Rejected by Manager or just completed).

enable proxy settings in SharePoint web.config to view RSS Viewer Web Part

Wael A. Kabli — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 11:57:00 GMT

Open your web.config on the site you want

to do this just tell the web.config that you have an internet access with a proxy:

Kit Kai's Tech Blog:

http://community.sgdotnet.org/blogs/kitkai/archive/2007/04/04/Consuming-RSS-Feeds-using-RSS-WebPart-.aspx

i have few notes here:

- you cannot have authenticated RSS feeds unless you enable Kerberos

- if you have your proxy as IP address like 192.168.1.3 and port 8080, your node still looks like

- you need to retart iis

[InfoPath] How to filter data on IP web enabled

Wael A. Kabli — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:44:00 GMT

One of the famous pitfalls in InfoPath 2007 is thinking that it doesn't have the ability to filter while on web or incase of having web-enabled forms. The few coming line will explain this issue and why many fall into this confusion…

Scenario: if you enabled web compatibility in IP 2007 and try to do a lookup on a field from a data source, sometimes you need to filter the information you get from external data source…

Let's say you have the following data:

Desktop Problems
- Hardware
- Software
Network Problems
- network cables
- IP telephone

Filter: you want to filter the data you bind to your controls, let's say if you have two fields, you want to show in the first field Desktop Problems, the second field should show only hardware and software.

Problem: if you try and filter on a field and the web compatibilities, you will get the following message: "Filtering is not supported in browser –enabled form templates."

Workaround:

Go to control you consider as primary field that it will be the filter key…in this case "MainDataSource.Category"
Right click, properties and Add a rule on it ..
The rule should have the following:
- Action: set a field's value
- Field: set the destination field where you want to filter your data. In this case "MainDataSource.SubCategories"
- Value: here you need to insert a field from the external data source such that the key field in your main data source is equal to the key field in the external data source. To do that do the following:
  - Here is the tricky part.
  - Click on the button (fx)…
  - Click on insert a field or a group
  - Choose the destination filed you want from the external data source. In this case "ExternalDataSource.SubCategories".
  - Click on the "Filter Data".
  - Click on Add
  - You have the format: <<Value>> <<Comparison>> <<Value>>
  - Choose: ExternalDataSource.KeyValue IsEqualTo MainDataSource.KeyValue
  - In this case: ExternalDataSource.Category IsEqualTo MainDataSource.Category
  - The click on "OK" Gazillion times. J

Go and Test…