The ECM team have release a tagging starter kit for SharePoint. Interesting. What would be really cool, though, would be for the system to automatically record people’s interests, based on searches performed, pages view, etc.. Might investigate, if I get time.
SharePoint
Nintex workflow extensions…
Angus Logan raves about Nintex workflow extensions. Design workflows over a web interface? How cool is that!
It’d be interesting to see how it works, but if it lives up to it’s promise, that’s a very cool product!
Comments from my old blog:
Product has launched and the feedback has been great. I think we have lived up to the promises.
Services in SharePoint 2007
One of my tasks recently has been building a service for SharePoint 2007. The idea is that this service would read a set of items in a list, apply some rules, and send out a notification email to various users as a sort of ‘digest’ of things that they needed to deal with. In the end, I produced a Windows service to do this – but there clever folks like Colin Byrne and Andrew Connell who’re starting to figure out how build ‘services’ (or ‘jobs’) into SharePoint 2007 directly, and I suspect this overcomes some of the issues I found. Continue reading “Services in SharePoint 2007”
Interesting article "WSS 3.0s suboptimal support for anonymous access scenarios"
Funny, I heard about a similar thing at the SharePoint UK user group meetings, and it didn’t sound very hard. This article suggests it is harder than I thought. Shame – I’ll have to do something similar to this shortly…
Disposing of SharePoint objects
You should dispose of SharePoint objects like SPWeb and SPSite. Gotta admit, I hadn’t realised they were disposable.
Ways of getting items in a List
An interesting look at how to get items from your SharePoint list. I didn’t know about the datatable view. Guess it can’t do a bulk update though.
Dude, whats my column type?
Some weird behaviour with SharePoint column types, and the data you get by looking at the SPListItem.properties hash.
So, I’ve got a document library, and I’ve added 3 extra columns to it. For simplicity, I shall call them ‘Text’, ‘Number’ and ‘CheckBox’. I filled in some data for them – a number in the Text field, the same number in the number field, and I check the checkbox for all of the items. I end up with a list looking like below…
So, for now, let’s ignore the fact that the value for some of the longer numbers has been rounded in one of the fields – and not ask why MOSS didn’t just complain that the numbers were too big. Instead, let’s ask what the column types being used are… Continue reading “Dude, whats my column type?”
More on Delay Activities, Workflow, and Beta 2 Tech Refresh
I’m coming to the conclusion that Beta 2 TR has broken Delay Activities…
What I did was build a test workflow. I’d got delay activities that weren’t working, and I wanted to investigate the possible factors involved.
I know that they were working just fine in Beta 2. I thought the difference here from what I was doing in Beta 2 was that I was setting the TimeoutDuration at runtime, through the InitializeTimeoutDuration function.
So I built a test workflow with 2 different parallel branches. One had a ‘static’ (design time) configured delay, and the other had a ‘dynamic’ (runtime) set delay. Both had an InitializeTimeoutDuration function set, though for the ‘static’ case all this did was log that it had been invoked.
I ran the workflow. My log file showed that the workflow ran both the InitializeTimeoutDuration functions, and nothing else.
Previously, I’d not run that function at all, so I tried configuring both Delays to not call InitializeTimeoutDuration. I ran the workflow, and again, nothing after the delays ever happened.
So I thought maybe it was because I had 2 delays. I disabled one sequence, and added a new second sequence that just contained a code step. I ran this – and again, anything after the Delay activity was never run.
In the end, I took one of the sequences outside the Parallel Activity. The workflow was now OnWorkflowActivated – Code – Delay – Code. And the second code step never runs.
I know this worked in Beta 2 – has the Tech Refresh broken this?
Comments from my old blog:
I got the same impression 😉 – Beta 2 TR has broken Delay Activities…
The frustration of Parallel activities
So, I came across an interesting situation.
I have be told to look at trying to build the workflow I’ve been working on (a state machine workflow) as a sequential workflow.
In this workflow, I need to run two parallel tasks. On one side, I wait for a task to be completed, and on the other, I want to have a delay step followed by an email activity, to send the reminder email after a delay.
The problem is, the ParallelActivity step will only complete when BOTH branches have completed. I can’t stop the branch with the email. In other words, the user finishes their work on the step, but the workflow won’t continue until the reminder email sent!
Equally, if the delay step was some sort of escalation process (rather than an email, it wouldn’t be able to escalate until the user had finished with the step!
There has to be a way around this, I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong though.
Comments from my old blog:
Hi,
you have to use an Listen activity, probably inside a while activity.
Note: the createTask activity you have to put outside the while.
Yup, I realised I was being a bit slow – and that an event listener activity could have multiple branches, and completes when any of the events is done. I don’t think I’d need a while loop, though.
I was just using the wrong activity type.
Setting DelayActivity.TimeoutDuration at runtime in WSS3 workflows
I need to use DelayActivity steps to ‘hold’ the sending of some notification emails until the correct time. That time is to be set at runtime.
However, it appears that in State Machine workflows the TimeoutDuration of a DelayActivity can only be set at design time. Trying to set it at runtime causes the DelayActivity to never expire.
I tried the same for a sequential workflow, and it worked okay. It seems this only affects State Machine workflows in SharePoint 2007 (MOSS)
EDIT: correction, it DIDN’T work okay in a sequential workflow. I’m sure I did this before, though. Perhaps it’s broken in Beta 2 TR, or maybe my memory is failing.
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