Workflow Scopes and Execution Properties - The Activity Designer. Or, Workflow Execution Properties for custom data passing. I wrote this after seeing a few forum posts from the Workflow Foundation Beta Forum on the same basic theme. Workflow 4.0 Arguments and Variables certainly do work for passing data to and from Activities in your workflow - but sometimes they don't feel easy enough to use. As an example, you might have created many custom activities that all need the exact same InArgument, such as a database connection, or a file writer. When you build your workflow manually in Workflow Designer, you notice that you're setting the exact same InArgument on every activity in your workflow. For scenarios like this, it would be nice if your custom activity was able to configure itself automatically based upon the scenario or context in which it executes.
Actually, during design of the framework there were a few activities that came close to the above description. Obvious questions 'How does it work? '' CorrelationScope works by using ExecutionProperties. Visual Expression Builder for Dynamic Linq. Download source - 99.32 KB Updated! The source code has been updated to make the dynamic types more robust! Table of Contents Introduction Linq is a great way to declaratively filter and query data in in a Type-Safe, Intuitive, and very expressive way. So here is a way for your users to filter their data no matter where that data comes from. It is the most valuable feature that you can add for your users in 4 lines of code.I would also recommend actually reading the code.
Using the Code The real functionality is in the two classes in the ViewModel. I know that most of you will want to know how this bad boy works, so you can use the same techniques in your own solutions. Somewhere in your ViewModel: public ExpressionList ExpressionList1 { get; set; } ExpressionList1 = new ExpressionList() {Type=typeof(Contact)} ; Then once your user selected all of the filters, you get your final query like this: var filteredContacts = contacts.Where(ExpressionList1.GetCompleteExpression<Contact>()); Background.
Using standard icons in a rehosted Workflow Designer - Mebyon Kernow. In this post I’ll show how you can easily use appropriate icons within the Workflow Designer toolbox. There are a number of posts out on the web that show varying ways to do this, however the method I’m proposing is most probably the easiest and most flexible. In days of yore you would simply use the [ToolboxBitmap] attribute and define a bitmap for your custom tools (an activity is just another tool in this instance), and when adding a tool to the toolbox you can optionally specify an icon – however if you don’t then you get the standard ‘cog’ on screen… If you want however to display the correct icon for a given activity you’ll need to do a bit more work and that’s where the fun starts.
The other is within the System.Activities.Presentation.dll which is redistributable, however this contains XAML resources and not standard bitmaps – and [ToolboxBitmap] expects an image resource not a slab of XAML. Step One: Add the workflow resources to your application Step Two: Create a converter. How to make ToolboxControl to show tooltips for custom activities? Hi Lee, I think you may not use ToolboxItemWrapper correctly. The ToolboxItemWrapper does not support pass ToolboxItem as its toolType argument.
You should pass Activity as its toolType argument. Like this: var itemWrapper1 = newToolboxItemWrapper(typeof(Assign)); Then when user drag&drop the item from rehost toolbox, an Assign will be added to Designer surface. Then you would like to know how could tooltip be added to rehost toolboxitem? What does the toolTipConvertor stand for? [ValueConversion(typeof(ToolboxItemWrapper), typeof(string))] publicclass ToolTipConvertor : IValueConverter public staticDictionary<ToolboxItemWrapper, string> ToolTipDic = new Dictionary<ToolboxItemWrapper, string>(); public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) ToolboxItemWrapper itemWrapper = (ToolboxItemWrapper)value; if (ToolTipDic.ContainsKey(itemWrapper)) return ToolTipDic[itemWrapper]; else returnnull; return null; category.Add(itemWrapper1);
How to create a Custom Activity Designer with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) - AppFabric Team Blog. The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) - Custom Activity Designer sample demonstrates how you can build an activity and activity designer. It includes three projects MyActivityLibrary - The activity library project MyActivityLibrary.Design - The activity designer project TestDesigner - A rehosted designer project useful for testing the activity The first step is to build your activity. Don't create a designer until you are satisifed with the interface to your activity in terms of arguments and properties.
The activity includes an InArgument and two properties including an enumerated value so you can see how to use these with your activity designer. 1: public sealed class MyActivity : NativeActivity<string> 3: public MyEnum Option { get; set; } 4: public bool TestCode { get; set; } 6: [DefaultValue(null)] 7: public InArgument<string> Text { get; set; } 9: protected override void Execute(NativeActivityContext context) 11: this.Result.Set( 12: context, 13: string.Format( 16: this.TestCode, ToolboxBitmapAttribute Class (System.Drawing) Allows you to specify an icon to represent a control in a container, such as the Microsoft Visual Studio Form Designer. [AttributeUsageAttribute(AttributeTargets.Class)] public class ToolboxBitmapAttribute : Attribute The ToolboxBitmapAttribute type exposes the following members.
The following code example demonstrates how to use the ToolboxBitmapAttribute class to set stop.bmp as the toolbox icon for the StopSignControl. This example assumes the existence of a 16-by-16-pixel bitmap named stop.bmp at c:\. .NET Framework Supported in: 4.5.1, 4.5, 4, 3.5, 3.0, 2.0, 1.1, 1.0 .NET Framework Client Profile Supported in: 4, 3.5 SP1 Windows Phone 8.1, Windows Phone 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows 7, Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 (Server Core Role not supported), Windows Server 2008 R2 (Server Core Role supported with SP1 or later; Itanium not supported) Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are thread safe.
Displaying .NET Framework 4 Built-In Workflow Activity Icons in a rehosted Workflow Designer - Application Server Group ISV Partner Advisory Team. Here is some code to extract the icons from the System.Activities.Presentation DLL, which is distributable. I'm looking for performance tips on this as it's a bit slow. protected void LoadToolBox() Resources.MergedDictionaries.Add(dict); var builder = new AttributeTableBuilder(); var standtypes = typeof(Activity).Assembly.GetTypes(). Where(t => typeof(Activity).IsAssignableFrom(t) && !
Var smtypes = typeof(Receive).Assembly.GetTypes(). var types = typeof(FileToString).Assembly.GetTypes(). Where(t => typeof(Activity).IsAssignableFrom(t) && ! Var primary = new ToolboxCategory("Microsoft Primary"); var secondary = new ToolboxCategory("Microsoft Secondary"); foreach (var type in standtypes.OrderBy(t => t.Name)) var w = new ToolboxItemWrapper(type, type.ToGenericTypeString()); if (AddIcon(type, builder)) secondary.Add(w); else primary.Add(w); var sm = new ToolboxCategory("Microsoft ServiceModel"); foreach (var type in smtypes.OrderBy(t => t.Name)) AddIcon(type, builder); sm.Add(w); cat.Add(w); if (index > 0) Data and Windows Workflow Foundation 4 - The Problem Solver. Data and Windows Workflow Foundation 4 One thing that has completely changed in Windows Workflow Foundation is the way we work with data in a workflow. In WF 3 we used properties to store data. We could use regular .NET properties but most of the time dependency properties where the smarter choice.
Dependency properties left the way data was stored to be handled by the workflow runtime but in our program we could use them just like any other property. And the big bonus was we could use property binding to tie different properties on different activities together in any way we saw fit. In WF 4 this has all changed! We are no longer using properties to store data. The root path is a big difference from WF3 where any activity could get to any other piece of data anywhere in the workflow. Take the following class: public class Customer public Customer(string name, CreditRating creditRating) Name = name; CreditRating = creditRating; public string Name { get; set; } public enum CreditRating Good, Poor.
A Developer's Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in .NET 4. Matt Milner, Pluralsight November 2009 Updated to release: April 2010 As software developers know, writing applications can be challenging, and we are constantly looking for tools and frameworks to simplify the process and help us focus on the business challenges we are trying to solve. We have moved from writing code in machine languages such as assembler to higher level languages like C# and Visual Basic that ease our development, remove lower level concerns such as memory management, and increase our productivity as developers. For Microsoft developers, the move to .NET allows the Common Language Runtime (CLR) to allocate memory, cleanup unneeded objects and handle low level constructs like pointers.
Much of the complexity of an application lives in the logic and processing that goes on behind the scenes. Having a runtime to manage memory and objects has freed us to focus more on the important business aspects of writing code. Designers Data Flow Flowchart Programming Model Activities = { Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) - Custom Activity Designer - Windows desktop samples. Miguel Isidoro : Windows Workflow - Using the HandleExternalEventActivity. Windows Workflow - Using the HandleExternalEventActivity Introduction This is the first in a series of blog posts dedicated to Windows Workflow. For those who don’t know, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is the new engine for building custom workflows (you can find more information about WF on the official web site).
It was released as part of the .NET Framework 3.0 along with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Local Service Communication Workflows are not isolated entities and most of the times need to communicate with the outside world in order to perform some task. CallExternalMethodActivity – Allows a workflow to call a method from an external service. Summary To build a workflow that uses HandleExternalEventActivity to communicate with a service using Local Service Communication, you’ll need to: Example In the constructor, a Boolean approve parameter is used. There are three properties worth mentioning here: And in case of rejection:
WF - Handling external events with HandleExternalEvent, External Data Exchange and Local Communications Services. Wednesday, October 18, 2006 1:04 AM bart In yesterday's post, you learned that the vast majority of workflows need to exchange data with other parties to get their jobs done. Just one of the benefits of workflows is the possibility to visualize this kind of interaction by means of different activities, like the CallExternalMethodActivity that was explained in the previous post. Based on a contract definition (read: interface) a workflow can be defined while the choice of the service implementation is left as a decision for the workflow host application.
In today's post, we continue our journey on the Local Communication Services and External Data Exchange path with the HandleExternalEventActivity. Scenario The CallExternalMethodActivity explained in the previous post is used to perform methods calls from inside the workflow to some service. A simple demo Workflow definition Next, create the following workflow definition in Workflow1.cs: This needs some elaboration. This.clientCount < 5. Windows Workflow Foundation: Creating a Custom Composite Activity.
Morgan Skinner Microsoft Premier Support for Developers Updated January 2006 for beta 2 Applies to: Windows Workflow Foundation beta 2 Microsoft Visual C# Version 2.0 Visual Studio 2005 Summary: This article constructs a custom composite activity and shows how to use that activity within a workflow. The activity in question is an extension of the Parallel activity shipped with the product, and provides an overview of validation, writing a custom executor component, and styling the user interface using designer and theme classes. (19 printed pages) Note This article was written using beta 2 and in the future some changes may need to be made to get this to work on later versions of Windows Workflow Foundation.
Download the code sample, Windows Workflow Sample - ParallelIf.msi. Contents IntroductionVisual ClassesBehaviorCustom ActivitiesActivities in UseFor More InformationAbout the Author Introduction The image shown in Figure 1 below shows the classes that I'll be using in this article. Behavior. Windows Workflow Foundation: Creating a Custom Composite Activity. Morgan Skinner Microsoft Application Developer Consulting September 2008 Applies to: Windows Workflow Foundation Microsoft Visual C# .NET Framework Version 3.0 Visual Studio 2008 Summary: This article constructs a custom composite activity and shows how to use that activity within a workflow. The activity in question is an extension of the Parallel activity shipped with the product, and provides an overview of validation, writing a custom executor component, and styling the user interface using designer and theme classes. (16 printed pages) Download the sample code Introduction In this article I'll delve into the details of developing custom activities for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and provide a sample implementation that includes all the parts that make up a custom activity.
The image shown in Figure 1 below shows the classes that I'll be using in this article. Figure 1. Visual Classes The ToolboxItem class The first class I'll describe is the ToolboxItem class. Figure 2. Figure 3.