MEA Culpa — SharePoint Designer * MAA * Lumikha ng daloy ng trabaho State Machine

4 tugon

I’ve recently learned that it’s possible and even fairly easy to create a state machine workflow using SharePoint Designer. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that good stuff and I had a need this week that looked for an invention. Coincidentally, Ako ay dumating sa kabuuan ang post na ito MSDN forum as well. My personal experience this week and that "independent confirmation" lends strength to my conviction. I plan to write about this at greater length with a full blown example, ngunit narito ang diwa ng ito:

  • Ang diskarte Pinakikinabangan ang katunayan na ang isang daloy ng trabaho ay maaaring baguhin ang isang item sa listahan, thereby triggering a new workflow. I’ve normally considered this to be a nuisance and even blog tungkol sa paggamit ng semaphores upang mahawakan ito.
  • SharePoint nagbibigay-daan sa maramihang mga independiyenteng mga daloy ng trabaho upang maging aktibo laban sa isang partikular na item listahan.

Upang i-configure ito:

  • Idisenyo ang iyong estado machine (ibig sabihin, ang estado at kung paano estado ng paglipat mula sa isa sa susunod).
  • Ipatupad ang bawat estado bilang hiwalay na mga daloy ng trabaho.
  • I-configure ang bawat isa sa mga daloy ng trabaho ng estado upang isakatuparan bilang tugon sa anumang mga pagbabago sa mga item sa listahan.

Ang bawat estado workflow sumusunod ito magaspang pattern:

  • Sa Pinasimulan, determine whether it should really run by inspecting state information in the "current item". Abort if not.
  • Ang trabaho.
  • Update the "current item" with new state information. This triggers an update to the current item and fires off all the state workflows.

Bukod sa halata na benepisyo na maaari isa lumikha ng isang paturol estado machine workflow, lahat na impormasyon sa estado ay kakila-kilabot para sa KPI gusali at mga kagiliw-giliw na tanawin.

Ginagawa magkaroon ng isang medyo makabuluhang sagabal — standard workflow history tracking is even more useless than normal 🙂 That’s easily remedied, gayunman. Store all of your audit type information in a custom list. That’s probably a good idea even for vanilla sequential workflow, but that’s for another blog post 🙂

I call this a "mea culpa" dahil mayroon akong, sa kasamaang-palad, said more than once on forums and elsewhere that one must use visual studio to create a state machine workflow. That simply isn’t true.

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4 ano sa tingin mo "MEA Culpa — SharePoint Designer * MAA * Lumikha ng daloy ng trabaho State Machine”

  1. Jaustral wrote:
    Hi Paul,
    how many states are you dealing with? I only get to have two different active workflows when I go to the workflow settings page?
    Pinakamagaling,
    Juan.
    Sumagot ↓
  2. Sanjeev Radput
    I’d really like to read the full examples. Hopefully one of you guys can help clarify some nightmares I’ve been having with my similar process. I’m at the point where I’m ready to start from fresh.
    Sumagot ↓
  3. Paul Galvin
    That’s a really interesting approach puts an exclamation point on the larger point that SPD can create state machine workflows.
    I don’t know if there are substantial differences performance-wise between what you outline and what I outline. In my case this week, performance isn’t an issue because this particular workflow is a long-running affair (16 or more weeks from start to finish) and there are never more than a few dozen active at any time. If there were a few dozen starting up and running every hour … that would be a different story. I think that performance and workflow in general is a very hazy subject.
    I don’t know if you run your own blog or not. If you do, you ought to consider writing about your approach in more detail. If not, I’d be more than happy to call you a "guest blogger" and upload your post to my blog.
    Salamat para sa mga komento. It’s one of the best I’ve been able to elicit on my blog!
    –Paul G
    Sumagot ↓
  4. Mike Atkins
    I implemented the state machine using a separate list to hold the state during the state transitions. The main workflow created an item here and set the initial state. I used a single, separate, workflow to handle all of the states, using an "IF-THEN-ELSEIF" structure (in "Step 1") on the possible states.
    For each state, all I needed to do was obtain a response from a user.
    My example was a multiple-level sequential approval, where each step (represented by a state) could have various possible successors. This meant that each user had (potentially) different options made available in a choice menu. My "Step Two" was also an "IF-THEN-ELSE" structure that considered all of the possible responses (from all stages), and then decided on what the next state should be. "Step 3" then set that state, and the workflow ended.
    This method has the (obvious) advantage of happening within a single (secondary) workflow. Gayunman, the scope of what could be accomplished in this workflow is more limited that one would have with workflows for each state. Ako ay nagtataka, gayunman, what sort of performance hit takes place if all of the individual state workflows start up (albeit ending immediately thereafter).
    Din, I use a secondary list (with its own workflow) to represent the transition between states as this process might be only part of a larger workflow. When the main workflow starts the state machine process, it goes into a wait state, and proceeds when the "looping" has termintaed. I was also contemplating the possibility that my main workflow may well want to change data in the original List Item, and I wanted to avoid having unnecessary "firings" of the state machine workflow.
    Sumagot ↓

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