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See how to enable scripts. Microsoft SharePoint Designer bit. Change Language:. Site workflows do not require a trigger to start. By far, the most common scenario for integrating BCS is to enable a workflow to interact with other business systems or databases.
This can be useful in many individual cases. Workflows can consume data from BCS to be used as parameters for conditional logic.
For example, a workflow may need to look up information about an employee from an enterprise resource planning ERP system to determine whether a certain type of approval for a task is required. Workflows can also write data to or modify data in external systems through BCS. An example for both of these methods is a vacation request workflow where a workflow queries the payroll system to determine whether an employee has vacation time available, gains necessary management approval, and then updates an item in an external list linked to the payroll system to record the time off.
After an external list is created, BCS removes much of the complexity and risk involved in working with external systems from your workflows. You generally can treat external lists like any other list that can be manipulated using the built-in Create, Modify, Delete, and Get actions. There are, of course, some specifics to be aware of when integrating BCS into workflows:. Limit the amount of data consumed from external lists in your workflows. Reading multiple values from the same external list item does not cache the item.
Therefore, the activity must call BCS for each column that is read. For example, reading 10 properties in a list of 2, items causes 20 calls to the Business Data Connectivity BDC service and retrieves 20, items from the external system. Extending workflows by using BCS can further enhance your ability to automate complex, multiuser business processes.
Still, it is a good idea to be aware of certain limitations with this approach, as listed in Table 5. Workflows cannot be associated directly with external lists, although they do work with external lists.
For example, you can create a site workflow or a list workflow on a SharePoint list such as a document library and have it read or update from an external list. You can also use an external list item as a destination for a task process in SharePoint Designer ; however, the link to the task will not display a title for the external list item. Because access to the external system is always through one account, you might lose track of who is making changes.
Workflows that access the Business Data Connectivity BDC service always run as the service account—which is usually the Internet Information Services IIS application pool account that is assigned to the web application in which the workflow is deployed.
This is true even under an impersonation step. This means that the BCS connection must be configured to use credentials from the Secure Store Service to allow the service account to impersonate an account with access the back-end store or service.
If you have to work with a large number of rows or columns, the built-in activities are not suitable. You could create a custom action to work more directly with BCS and bypass the limitations of the default actions. After you create the external list, you just add another Create List Item activity that uses the external list with the existing workflow to complete the integration. This section examines how developers can create custom activities to further extend SharePoint Designer workflows.
The Contoso Coffee example provides a business process problem that can be solved with a highly customized workflow. To provide a comprehensive overview of custom workflow activities, this section examines related features and tools, common scenarios, usage guidance, and constraints. You need to send some of the data found in the requisition list to this service, following proper security and efficiency practices.
Although much can be done with SharePoint Designer and Visio Premium , you likely will encounter situations where you must do something that cannot be modeled easily in a SharePoint workflow. This is often a "last 10 percent" problem, where one specific but important requirement jeopardizes an otherwise highly useful workflow. To bridge this gap, you need one of the most important features in the SharePoint workflow system: the ability to create custom workflow activities to extend the kinds of things that workflows can do.
When built-in workflow activities do not meet specific business requirements, custom activities become especially useful. This means that after a custom activity is created, it can be used inside SharePoint Designer. For example, you can create a custom activity that adds relevant users and their permissions to a site. Because a no-code workflow can be extended with a specific activity or set of activities, your investment in costly development can be focused on where it is most valuable.
Custom activities are reusable and, when they are deployed, you can use them in workflows across all sites in your SharePoint farm. Sandboxed Activities vs. Full-Trust Activities for SharePoint Workflows As with almost all SharePoint development efforts, the choice of whether to use a sandboxed activity or an activity that requires full trust is important.
Sandboxed activities provide some significant advantages. Namely, they can be deployed to a site collection by a site owner entirely through the administrative web UI; it is not necessary to involve IT administration. The sandbox also provides some measure of safety, preventing code from doing anything that might affect other areas of the system. Yet, sandboxed activities are limited in some key ways—mainly, they are not allowed to make network calls to other servers, and access to the SharePoint APIs is limited.
For information about when to use either the sandboxed or full-trust approach, see the Usage Guidance for Creating Custom SharePoint Workflow Activities section. Visual Studio Visual Studio includes significantly enhanced tooling as compared to earlier versions for easily creating, packaging, and deploying code to SharePoint Custom activities are ideal for interacting with SharePoint itself in a way beyond what is possible using built-in actions.
For example, you might have to provision a new workspace site as part of the process of collecting feedback or approval on a document. Some business processes require a complex set of conditions and actions that can be better represented with a small bit of custom code.
Custom utility activities can be created to provide a useful service that was not included with the product. For example, you can create an activity that replaces certain words in a string. After you write code, you make a de facto commitment to maintaining it. You also introduce additional risk into both your process and, potentially, the entire SharePoint environment.
For this reason, you should exhaust all capabilities built into a SharePoint workflow before choosing to develop a custom action. Limit the scope of what a single custom activity does. Activities should be seen as interchangeable, reusable pieces that are assembled into finished workflows—not as complete processes themselves.
However, this approach requires other considerations, such as the need for a development team to make changes. Properly designed workflow activities can reduce this burden and the risk it introduces.
Design custom activities with reusability in mind, and do not "hard code" too much about the details of the task being created. Allow workflow authors to configure sufficient properties to enable new use cases. Although the workflow history list is a useful tool for surfacing information to workflow owners, be cautious about history list usage. Over-logging to the history list can cause performance and scale issues. In addition, events can "age off" of the list as more entries are added to it.
You must follow the coding standards for general. NET development, workflow development, and SharePoint object model development. Custom activities can be deployed as part of a sandboxed solution or in a fully-trusted farm solution. In addition, the sandboxed execution model provides another level of risk mitigation, preventing code in an activity from doing something unsafe or dangerous.
When possible, you should develop activities in a way that is compatible with a sandboxed solution. However, some constraints apply that may require a farm-level deployment see Table 7. Custom activities extend no-code workflows instead of replacing them. Logic-modeling limitations do-while loops, state machines, and the like still apply, and if a break outside that box is necessary, you may need to think about developing a fully code-based workflow. Code including custom activities that is deployed in a sandboxed solution is subject to several restrictions.
Significantly, code cannot make network calls outside the SharePoint farm on which it is deployed. Also, some parts of the SharePoint object model are not available. Full functionality requires code to be deployed to the server farm or other established patterns for partially escaping the sandbox.
You create a WSP package that contains a full-trust activity that must be deployed to the farm. The IT professionals who manage the SharePoint farm deploy the activity.
Again, integration involves only adding this new custom activity to the existing workflow and configuring it. Finally, this section discusses using Visual Studio and basic code to create an increasingly complex workflow. Returning to the Contoso Coffee example, as demand for an even easier and faster HR process increases, so too does the need for a more powerful and flexible automated solution. To provide an overview of how Visual Studio can provide this solution, this section describes relevant features and tools, common scenarios, usage guidance, and constraints.
The newly customized approval process now handles the end-to-end task of creating a job posting at Contoso Coffee. However, there is also an organizational desire to automate more of the recruiting process. Instead of dealing with only new requisitions, a job now must be processed through several stages: submission, recruiting, hiring, and on-boarding.
Although you can create and use almost any piece of functionality in no-code workflows, you still may encounter a situation where a process or requirement simply does not fit within the declarative workflow paradigm.
In this situation, you require lower-level development, which Visual Studio can provide. SharePoint Workflow Project Template Visual Studio includes a SharePoint workflow project template that lets a developer build workflows using the full capability and power of Windows Workflow Foundation. For example, a workflow may need to use a do-while loop to perform an activity while waiting for a condition or, more likely, a set of conditions to change.
One commonly requested do-while loop is repeatedly notifying a person or group about the workflow status until an action is taken. As another example, you might determine that a state machine workflow based on events and transitions better models a business problem than a sequential SharePoint Designer workflow. Perhaps a form needs code to call to an external system to populate certain fields or to provide search engine-like suggestions while a user enters data.
In a code-driven workflow, you use ASP. NET web forms technology to create custom forms that can perform almost any action and then, through the workflow API, interact with the underlying workflow. Rich Debugging Tools in Visual Studio In terms of developer productivity, a critical feature of code-based workflows is the ability to fully debug a workflow on a step-by-step basis.
There is no similar debugger available for a declarative workflow. Debugging a workflow using Visual Studio is similar to any other project—you can add breakpoints to workflow code and use stack tracing and other debugging tools for.
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