One of the emerging patterns I find in crafting SharePoint solutions leverages SharePoint Designer workflow and an event receiver.

Here is a business scenario to put it in context:

• I upload a document to a doc lib.
• I kick off multi-step workflow created using SharePoint Designer.
• At some point during that process, workflow assigns a task to someone (via collect data from user or assign a task).
• We want to use a KPI to track how long that task is awaiting completion.  The KPI shows green for tasks that are completed or due more than 3 days from now.  It shows yellow if the task is due tomorrow or today.  It shows red if the task is past due.
• Here’s the kicker: I want the date that drives that KPI to be holiday-aware.

I can’t calculate a holiday-aware due date in SharePoint Designer workflow very easily.  I would have to create a custom action or use a 3rd party tool.  However, it’s easy enough to calculate such a date in an event receiver.  Merge those two together and we get a pattern like this:

• Define a hidden yes/no site column on the document library labeled "DoCalcualteDueDate".
• Initialize it to false.
• At the appropriate time in the workflow (e.g. just before the "collect data" action), assign that value to True.
• An ItemUpdate() event receiver looks to see if "DoCalculateDueDate" is true.  Since the event receiver runs on every update, "DoCalculateDueDate" is normally false.
• When workflow assigns DoCalculateDueDate to true, the event receiver calculates the holiday-aware due date.
• When the event receiver does this calculation, it sets the DoCalculateDueDate flag to false.

In the end, SPD workflow is communicated with an event receiver via the DoCalculateDueDate semaphore and we have holiday-aware due dates that are assigned at the exactly correct moment in the workflow’s life.  SharePoint Designer controls when the due date is assigned but the event receiver performs the actual calculation and assignment.

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UPDATE: I’ve been researching how to embed a SPD workflow into a site definition.  This MSDN forum chain has some interesting information.  It’s not conclusive, but points to path through the jungle.

I’m giving this post a slightly oddball "Observed Behavior" lead since I’m a little leery of drawing conclusions from it.  SPD workflows are … temperamental.

People are often asking / wondering / fretting over moving SPD workflows from one place to another.  Today, I followed these steps and made these observations:

• I created a workflow using SharePoint Designer in a site attached to a document library.
• The associated document library already housed several documents.
• I saved the site as a template.
• When I saved the site as a template, I saved the content as well.
• I created a new site in the same site collection using that template.

At this point, I tried to run the workflow.  It promptly terminated itself with the log message, "Failed on start".

I expected this.  I have low expectations when it comes to moving SPD workflows around.

I continued:

• Opened the site in SharePoint Designer.
• Had a peek at the workflow.  It seemed fine.
• I clicked "Finish".
• I ran the workflow.

This time, it worked fine.

I’ll add that this workflow used the "collect data from user" action which is a relatively complex action under the hood.

I tentatively conclude that the process of "finishing" the workflow caused SPD to properly associate the SPD workflow with the new document library.  I also conclude the XOML and other XML artifacts are reasonably "loose".  They are not super tightly coupled to the document library.

What does this mean?  Assuming it’s a reliable and reproducible process, there’s at least one rough method we can use to move them around.  I don’t know if this would work if we crossed site collection boundaries or even more drastically, entire new farms (e.g. dev to stage to prod). 

If you’re reading this and inclined, please post a comment or email me your SharePoint Designer migration story.  I’ll gladly update this posting with any insights thus offered.

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It’s often useful to store status information in a custom list such as an approval code which should never be directly manipulated by end users.  This is a common business scenario.  I have been working on a project this year that generates various status and reminder dates via SharePoint Designer workflows that then drive KPIs and generally support time-critical business processes. 

Use a site content type / column to achieve this effect.

Create a site content type with the status column as shown:

Note the "Status (for Demo)" field at the bottom.

Next, click on the column name to access the column’s properties.  Select "Hidden (Will not appear in forms)" in the Column Settings section as shown:

This removes the field from the standard edit/update forms.  However, it is still available in views, KPIs, the object model and anywhere else you want to use it, including SPD workflow. 

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This blog entry is more of an "in the realm of the possible" entry vs. concrete info.

We have a technical design that calls for us to create a site in a site collection via a manually launched workflow process.  Basically, users enter data into a "new customer" custom list and then when they have finished and validated the data entry process, we need to create a site for that customer.

I’m both a big fan of declarative workflow as well as a weak visual studio workflow programmer, so I wanted to meet the requirement using SharePoint Designer.

I plan to write about this in greater detail (and hopefully present to a user group or two in the coming year), but here’s the overall solution:

• Create a custom action that integrates with SPD.
• The custom action allows SPD to invoke a web service and pass it a string of XML.
• Web service locates the row in the custom list and creates a new site as per the data for that new client using a custom site definition.
• Web service then updates the custom list with some information such as a link to the new site.

We considered other approaches, such as event handlers and visual studio based workflow.  The SPD approach gives our end users a little more control over the process.  Granted, there’s a lot of C# code in this solution, but it’s wrapped inside a declarative workflow, so we get some of the benefits of declarative workflow while hooking into the site-creation service.

All we need now is an easy tool to automatically migrate SPD workflows around as easily as we can for visual studio workflows and we’ll really be cooking with gas 🙂  I understand that some folk are out there working on this problem and I hope they have some good success with it soon.

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I’ve been playing around with custom actions for SharePoint Designer for some time (see here for some detailed stuff, if that interests you).

In my current project, we need to do some fairly heavy lifting and we want to use declarative SPD workflow to manage the associated business process. 

Long story short, this is entirely possible.  I extended my Codeplex project to invoke a "helper service" and now we can invoke a web service directly from an SPD workflow. 

Here’s the signature:

 public string Dispatcher(
        Guid WebID, // Passed by the runtime environment
        Guid SiteID, // Passed by the runtime environment
        string ListID, // Passed by the RTE (don't know why this is a string, not a GUID)
        int ListItemID, // Passed by the RTE.
        string XmlMessage) // Passed by the user as declared in SPD.

This leverages the fact that we can get at important workflow information, like the site, list ID, etc.  This is well documented in several places for those of you interested in creating your own custom actions.  The idea is to extract the XML string as provided by the user to dispatch an appropriate procedure.  Fun stuff!

Sadly, this is obviously a one-way ticket down to "Loosey Goosey" anti-pattern land, but it’s better than hitting a brick wall 🙂

Is it an anti-pattern if you do it even though you know it’s an anti-pattern?

I hope to wrap this inside Codeplex in the near future.  If you’re interested in me doing so, give me poke (email or leave a comment) and I’ll be that more enthusiastic about doing it 🙂

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