Unleash extra power to SharePoint 2007 Workflows

April 4, 2010   14:06

I’m very enthusiastic about the Nintex Workflow product. With Nintex Workflow it is possible to build very advanced workflows. The downside of course, is that that Nintex is a 3rd party product and therefore it isn’t available in all my projects. In that case I will have to rely on the normal SharePoint Designer Workflows.

The problem with normal workflow actions is that they are designed to work inside a single web. It is not possible, for example, to create a new list item in a different web. Creating list items in different webs is a very powerful feature, because it allows us to interact with different site areas and we might also want to initiate new workflows over there.

To overcome the short come of these standard workflow actions, we can use the SharePoint web services. But there is one major problem: SharePoint Designer Workflows don’t have a workflow action that allows you to call SharePoint web services.

Luckily I found a project at CodePlex which allows us to do just that. The iLoveSharePoint project contains a subproject with the name SharePoint Designer Actions V1.0. Download this expansion for SharePoint Designer and install it at your SharePoint farm.

Below I will provide a few demonstration steps that will use the following new SharePoint Designer Actions from iLoveSharePoint:

• Call a WebService
• Query XML

The “Call a WebService” action will allow us to communicate with the Microsoft SharePoint web services and provides us with an almost unlimited range of extra development possibilities. The small downside is that these actions are advanced and that it takes some time to configure them.

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Posted in SharePoint, Tools | Permalink | Read 3 comments

Front-end file system cache problems might occur after a SharePoint configuration database restore.

March 25, 2010   17:41

Last week I was working at a client who just restored one of their SharePoint environments because of a site error. Everything was functioning like normal, until we discovered a major issue with the InfoPath forms publishing mechanism.

For some of the Infopath forms we received an error while upgrading the form to a newer version. The error statement told us that we could not update the form because of an object in the database with the same ID.

To resolve the error we tried to remove the existing form, but instead of removing the form, SharePoint decided to do the opposite and it tried to start some kind of upgrade process. We had no more options to upgrade or even delete the existing form.

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Posted in Errors, SQL Server, SharePoint | Permalink | Read 1 comment