Chapter 22. Developing Advanced Workflows
Understanding Workflow Designer common dialog boxes
A workflow scenario: document approval
A workflow scenario: newsletters
Earlier chapters familiarized you with general Windows Workflow Foundation and SharePoint workflow concepts and introduced you to SharePoint Designer's Workflow Designer and the SharePoint administrative options for workflows. Until now, SharePoint Designer capabilities for designing workflows have been explored in a more generic way to help you understand the complete picture of where SharePoint Designer workflows fit into the larger SharePoint Workflow infrastructure.
This chapter, however, primarily focuses on SharePoint Designer's Workflow Designer capabilities and options for developing advanced workflows declaratively for SharePoint Web sites. Workflow Designer allows you to perform a number of workflow-related tasks by using conditions and actions. Conditions and actions are just predefined custom workflow activities that are installed on the SharePoint server during initial setup and installation. Workflow Designer provides the user interface to declaratively use these conditions and actions to write workflow files, associate them with SharePoint lists and libraries, and then deploy them to SharePoint sites. These workflow files are then compiled at runtime and executed when the first instance of the workflow is asked to run.
The user interface to configure these conditions and actions is mostly governed by a number of user interface sentences. These sentences are basically user interface descriptions of the conditions and actions. They contain hyperlinks that are access points to a set of dialog boxes and configuration wizards responsible for providing the interface to designers for making settings specific to the conditions or actions. Workflow Designer dialog boxes and wizards provide the user interface for a specific functionality and are used across multiple conditions and actions depending on the feature required. For example, the Define Workflow Lookup is one of the most commonly used dialog boxes and is used by multiple conditions and actions for performing lookups across SharePoint lists and libraries.
The first section in this chapter strives to help you understand these common dialog boxes in Workflow Designer. In later sections in this chapter, I take you through some scenarios that illustrate how easily you can exploit predefined conditions and actions provided in Workflow Designer for designing advanced workflows for SharePoint lists and libraries. You step through exercises that are designed to familiarize you with using conditions and actions in Workflow Designer for designing workflows for real-world scenarios.