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Unleash extra power to SharePoint 2007 WorkflowsApril 4, 2010 14:06
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:
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. Tags: action, demo, sharepoint designer, tutorial, webservice, workflow, xml, xpath.Audience compilation via the command lineMay 13, 2009 9:58
The only other option on the page is to schedule the compilation, but it can only be scheduled to run once a day. Not very useful during development. After some digging I found the command line application to control the audience job and luckily it wasn’t very complicated to use. Just run the application to get some more information:
c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Bin>audiencejob.exe
AudienceJob.exe Application Id: Guid corresponding to Search application Command: 1 = Start, 0 = Stop Crawl Type: 1 = Full, 0 = Incremental (default = 1) Audience Name: Specific audience to compile (default = all) Application Id for SharedServicesProvider1: 23ec9668-ea04-4842-b9ba-8e39cfaeaa3d The best of it is that the application provides you the GUIDs of available Shared Service providers. To start a new compilation from scratch for all the audiences, run the command with the given GUID and the two other parameters:
c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\12.0\Bin>audiencejob.exe 23ec9668-ea04-4842-b9ba-8e39cfaeaa3d 1 1
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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.
Last month I had to work a lot with audiences and of course my development environment had an annoying malfunction. The manage audience page (/_layouts/Audience_Main.aspx) contains a nice compilation link, but it didn’t work.