Dears,
I'm interested to know how to evaluate the event to determine if a starting rule or wait condition is satisfied programmatically.
Is there any detailed documentation to Workflow server 9 SDK?
Thanks,
The WF SDK documentation available comes with the installation. See C:\Program Files (x86)\Laserfiche\Laserfiche Workflow 9\SDK for code samples and help files.
You can trigger a starting rule and you can mark a condition as satisfied through the Workflow SDK, but not run the condition evaluation. Is there a reason why you would not want Workflow do the evaluation itself?
The SDK installer should have come with detailed documentation. If you do not have the SDK you might just need the Script activity in workflow. That is also a C#, VB compiler.
You could use a workflow script to write C# code for example to inform you when a specific workflow is triggered.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean... why would you want the condition evaluation yourself to find out if a user started a workflow? Is it for security purposes? What is it expected to happen if the user starts a workflow he shouldn't?
You can add a Conditional Decision to the beginning of your workflows to check for that user and email you. But if the goal is to make sure that a specific user is not starting workflows, then wouldn't it be easier to specifically exclude them?
To be instantly notified when a user starts a workflow, the first thing in the workflow should be a 2 branch decision: Branch 1 it is/was your monitored user that triggered it so email you and Branch 2 it was not your monitored user so just continue. This is easy to add to the top of any workflow and does not require any custom SDK coding.
No, I don't need to build Workflow System rather, I need to use the workflow engine that is already there and already provides its API.
As you said we can develop Workflow system from scratch using notifications by LF SDK, in fact we can do this because we have the documented LF SKD that tells us a hint of doing so.
For example if I need to create a web-based dashboard that monitor the entire workflow server. how many workflow running and how many users has pending workflow and intiated a workflow and so on.
This is impossible to be done without WF server API and clear documentation.
What I'm asking for is only the documentation, Is there any alternative?
Thanks,
A web dashboard that list statistics and user tasks would be easier to build with business processes and SQL reporting against the BP tables. See this white paper for more on the SQL tables.
Thank you Miruna, Could you please let me know if there is WF SDK documentation available? or similar detailed whitepapers?
The WF SDK documentation available comes with the installation. See C:\Program Files (x86)\Laserfiche\Laserfiche Workflow 9\SDK for code samples and help files.
I already know this, but the documentation is not helpful like LF SDK, and the samples covers only custom activity and workflow invocation.
I understood that Laserfiche releases partial documentation as needed based on repeated queries and what people would want to use it.
Thanks a lot.
First of all, I've said that "I'm interested to know". There is no current business cases or actual need requires this technique.
The bottom line of my post is to know how to use WF SDK to act like Workflow server, I see a vast of functions in the provided SDK without any helpful material teaches us how to use all of them (like LF SDK and Client Automation).
If the target of the SDK is to do like WF server jobs and to access WF objects by developers, why we don't have guides!!
Please if you have such guide, could you share it. I couldn't find any related documents by my search.
That's it, I appreciate your support and interesting.
Thanks,
There is no Workflow SDK functionality to detect if all the start rule criteria is meet. As soon as all start rule criteria are meet, Workflow is triggered. This happens before any workflow code is run for the workflow.
You stated above, that you wanted to be notified as soon as a certain person triggered a workflow and asked for the tools to allow that. The tools to do that are not in the SDK, but in how you build your workflow. If the first step in the workflow rule is to check the initiator and then send notification, you have what you asked for.
If on the other hand, you are really asking how to develop your own workflow like system, then that is a whole other topic and is done with the LF SDK not the Workflow SDK.
The Workflow SDK is provided mostly for creating custom activities. The rest of it is not well documented because of the time commitment it would have taken when we didn't have a good idea of what people would want to use it for.
That is why Bert and I tried to address your use cases rather than pointing you to documentation. As I said above, condition evaluation is not available through the WF SDK. You can tell Workflow that you want to it to start a workflow and you can tell it to bypass a condition, but you can't make it run the condition evaluation code. That is done in the Subscriber and not currently exposed through the SDK.
Thank you all for your kind response and interesting
Do you need to have Visual Studio?
No.