I have a solution in VS2012 with a SharePoint 2013 sandboxed project. I have created some custom workflows in 2013.
What I really need to do is to have an approval workflow to publish content, and send out an email when a new document is approved.
My first thought was to use the OOB approval 2010 workflow and use an event receiver on the list. When an item becomes approved, I would send out an email, but I'm unable to send emails programmatically in SharePoint online.
My second thought was to recreate the workflow in 2013, since I know I can send emails out that way, but it looks like the activities related to content approval were removed for 2013 workflows. I can try and do the approvals via rest calls, but my concern was that my workflow will fire every time the item in the list changes (even if it's not a publish), so I will have to check (in the workflow) if the item is being published or not. This will cause the workflow history for the items to become pretty useless as it will be filled with mostly white noise. Also, as far as I can tell, the checkbox when you create an association for "Start this workflow to approve publishing a major version of an item." does not apply to 2013 workflows.
I believe my best answer at this time would be to create a custom 2010 workflow, but I don't see how I can do that from inside VS2012. Can anyone help me (or maybe suggestion another alternative to achieving my goal?)
You can just turn on the old (2007) approval workflows. It sounds like those might work for you.
This article references how to do that, but in short it is under
Site Settings -> Site Collection Administration -> Site Collection Features -> enable the feature 'SharePoint 2007 Workflows'
Configuring SharePoint 2013 to use legacy workflows
I ended up using an OOB 2010 Workflow and modifying it with SharePoint Designer. Not really the solution I wanted (which was to package ALL of my customizations into a single WSP), but I've spent more time than I should have trying to get it to work.
Related
Good morning. I am using SharePoint 2013 but created a SharePoint 2010 Reusable Workflow in SharePoint Designer. It is an Approval workflow that I want to use on 5 different Meet-Me line request lists. The workflow is the same for all except that the approval email that goes to the requester has the different meet-me line info (access codes, etc). Is there a way to customize the reusable workflow for each line? Thank you.
Scott
Its a good question but I don't think Microsoft provided any option to customize the reusable work flow.
I also tried before but no luck.
i need to know few things please
1- is sharepoint with windows workflow foundation (a good and dependable engine)
2- i am using .NET and sharepoint, what would be the best workflow plugin for sharepoint
we need it provide easy interface to create the work flow, connect and affect oracle, SQLSERVER, work with moss2007, give us full control on the look and design of the form page as well as the approval or any pages and forms used within the workflow ( am i asking for too much !!:) )
the workflows will be used for approvals, change requests, requests of equipments, leave application, .... etc
Windows Workflow Foundation is very strong and can be relied upon for SharePoint workflows.
In the market there are lot of plugins available for workflow creation.
SharePoint Desginer
ShareVis Designer
Nintex Workflow
Captaris Workflow
I have provided a few references above. Kindly evaluate your needs and use one of them.
SharePoint makes use of Windows Workflow Foundation and it's a pretty stable and powerful solution. If you need an easy to use interface to create workflows, you may want to take a look at Nintex Workflow. We use it at the company and are very pleased with it. There are versions for both SharePoint 2007 and 2010.
http://www.nintex.com/en-US/Pages/default.aspx
I`m interested in adding SharePoint Workflow Modification programmatically from my workflow, without using forms.
What i'm trying to achieve - I want to add Workflow modification when user uploads new document version to document library. I have OnWorkflowItemChanged and from there i'm willing to add WF Modification.
Is this possible?
To clarify some things:
I`m writing a custom Workflow in Visual Studio.
What I want is to add items to (SPWorkflowModificationCollection) SPWorkflow.Modifications object. However there is no Add method, but the designed way to add items there is by using Workflow Modification forms.
In this case, i don't want user to use modification form, but i want to add workflow modifications (which will populate the collection AND triger OnWorkflowModified event).
I am not 100% sure what you mean by workflow modification. Do you want to modify the workflow itself from a workflow or just modify a document or item from a SharePoint Workflow?
Regardless, I'll give you the same answer to what was accepted as the answer to a similar question.
Workflow is one of the strong parts of SharePoint. Out-of-the box you or your users can build workflows using the free SharePoint Designer. Depending on your exact requirements this may be good enough.
If you need a more advanced workflow editor then you may want to consider Nintex Workflow or K2. Alternatively you can write your own workflows in Visual Studio or buy 3rd part Workflow Actions for SharePoint Designer.
I have included some useful links below:
Building workflows using SharePoint Designer
Creating workflows using Visual Studio
3rd Part Workflow actions to embed VB or C# directly into SharePoint Designer Workflows. Note that I have worked on this product so consider my recommendation biased ;-)
To preface, I am working with SharePoint Server 2010 Beta 2, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC.
I have built a custom Content Type based on the Item type with a few custom site columns. I also have built a custom Sequential Workflow using Visual Studio 2010. This is a relatively simple workflow that creates a task, waits for the task to complete, sets the workflow to complete. I am able to deploy this workflow to the site collection through VS 2010 deploy (which is pretty nice, btw). The problem I have is that when I try to associate the custom Content Type with my custom workflow, that workflow is not listed in the workflow templates to choose from. There are only the OOTB SharePoint workflows to choose. The kicker is that if I create a list and associate a workflow to that list, my custom workflow is in the workflow template list. This makes sense since at the start of building a custom workflow in VS2010, one of the first questions is whether the workflow is a Site or a List workflow and I selected List. Is the issue that List workflows are not allowed to be associated with Content Types?!?
Thanks.
In your workflow's elements.xml, look for AssociationCategories and change it to ContentType like so:
<AssociationCategories>ContentType</AssociationCategories>
Big thanks to my co-worker, Yves for pointing this out :)
I am planning to build a case management system from scratch, The system will incorporate a workflow. Cases will contain activities to be performed by different people inside and outside the company within a specified window of time.
Does SharePoint support a configurable workflow engine that I might use for this project?
Absolutely. Workflow is one of the strong parts of SharePoint. Out-of-the box you or your users can build workflows using the free SharePoint Designer. Depending on your exact requirements this may be good enough.
If you need a more advanced workflow editor then you may want to consider Nintex Workflow or K2. Alternatively you can write your own workflows in Visual Studio or buy 3rd part Workflow Actions for SharePoint Designer.
I have included some useful links below:
Building workflows using SharePoint Designer
Creating workflows using Visual Studio
3rd Part Workflow actions to embed VB or C# directly into SharePoint Designer Workflows. Note that I have worked on this product so consider my recommendation biased ;-)