Custom WorkFlows .. - Sitefinity - General Discussions

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Posted by Community Admin on 10-Jan-2011 00:00

Hi Ivan,

Does SiteFinity just take Custom Workflows as services ? Is there anyway to just create a regular workflow and have it run. Any tips would be appreciated.

Regards,
Jon

Posted by Community Admin on 11-Jan-2011 00:00

Hello Jon,

Can you give us a sample case - what do you want to achieve, so we can give you a more helpful answer. Please give us more details on the term "regular" workflow and where you want to use it.

Generally for the content(news,events,pages etc.) approval workflow we use WWF xamlx files hosted in WCF service. If you have the professional license you can associate your custom xaml files with the content, but they have to comply to certain rules(use custom Sitefinity's WF activities) in order to be usable for the approval workflow. The most important one is the DecisionActivity - which specifies what next options(actions) you have at a certain status of the item - example: on "Draft" status you have "Send For Approval" and "Delete" action, on "Awaiting Approval" status - you have "Reject" and "Publish" - these are specified by using a DecisionActivity in the FlowCharts. By extending these workflows(changing the xamlx files) - you can call your own subworkflows at a certain points in the process. We will be having some additional blog posts on this topic soon - for example how to extend the workflow to translate your content automatically with Google translate services.

Kind regards,
Nikolay Datchev
the Telerik team

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Posted by Community Admin on 16-Jan-2011 00:00

Rather than a sub-workflow, we need to implement a workflow with a 4-stage approval process for publishing pages.

Is it possible to do this by replicating portions of the existing 2-stage approval process? (For instance, can I add, to the 2-stage approval process flow, additional DecisionActivity steps for transitioning through the status of a page? If so, would new statuses be required such as Draft, Awaiting Approval1, Awaiting Approval2, etc?) Alternately, with an enterprise license, can the DecisionActivity code itself be customized?

Any hints or links into documentation would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you,
Valerie

Posted by Community Admin on 21-Jan-2011 00:00

Hello Jon,
Yes, it is possible to replicate the 2 level workflow into a 4 levels workflow. And yes you will need new statuses.
There are currently some limitations to extending the workflow you should know.
1) If you add new types of approval role and related GuardActivityes in your workflow, there will be no way to assign users to these roles through the current UI. Currently the UI is fixed for our hard-coded Approvers and Publishers roles
2)I have to know exactly what do you want to extend in the decision activity, to tell you if it is possible. Generally you can inherit the decision activity and do somethign additional to the base execute code. Also the way we build our Workflow UI(the actions buttons on the menu) is related to parsing the workflow tree and finding the decision activities in a specific workflow status. So for example changes in the decision activity logic, might have to cause changes in our FlowchartWorkflowInspector, which can get kind of complicated. So give me some sample and i will try to help further.
3) There is currently no offical custom workflow documentation samples, apart from the xamlx files themselves. We will try to provide good samples as soon as possible in the mean time you can count on our support for specific issues.

Regards
All the best,
Nikolay Datchev
the Telerik team

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