Hi, I’m JongHwa Lim, a Program Manager at SharePoint Designer team.

A workflow for a leisure event company

Let’s assume there is a leisure company named Contoso Leisure and it provides leisure lessons such as horseback riding, fishing, clay shooting, paragliding, and skydiving.

And let’s assume we need an approval workflow which does the following.

• Request approval from the Event Coordinator SharePoint Group
• If rejected, send rejection mail to the customer
• If approved, wait until 5 days before the event/lesson and then send reminder mail for the event
  • Reminder mail contains information on the event such as weather information and a map with driving direction

In this workflow example, we will use two web services but only one web service will be handled by ‘call HTTP Web Service’ action available in SPD. The other web service will be referenced inside of a String variable and put into the mail body with an <IMG> tag. For more information, you can reference the Bing Map API page. (https://www.microsoft.com/maps/developers/web.aspx)

If you create the workflow yourself, the following workflow will be created.

Please notice that the ‘Get Weather Info’ stage has a ‘Call HTTP Web Service’ action and if you click the first parameter, you will see the following URL is used, where the web service key is stored in a separate list named ‘Web Service Keys’. I will defer the explanation and usage of the Web Service action, Get Item from Dictionary action and Loop container to a previous blog post by HyongGuk Kim.(https://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2012/09/05/how-to-work-with-web-service-using-call-http-web-service-action.aspx)

And if you click the ‘Set Workflow Variable’ action in the ‘Send Reminder Email’ stage, you will find it also uses the ‘Web Service Keys’ list to store the web service key or token.

Let’s make this more realistic

In a real life situation, the web service keys may need to be managed securely. To do that, we need to secure them by storing them in a list which is accessible only by people with Full Control privilege. But in this case, the normal workflow logic would fail to access the web service keys as it is run under the permission of workflow initiator and (logical AND) that of Workflow App. So if the workflow initiator does not have permission to access the list that contains the web service keys, the workflow will fail. To make the workflow logic run under only the Workflow App permission which is Read/Write to all site lists, we need to use an App Step.

Step 1. Make the list secure by having independent permission

As explained, we need to make the list containing the web service keys accessible only by Full Control users. To do that, you need to stop inheritance and remove unnecessary users from the list.

Let’s say the list is ‘Web Service Keys’ list. If you go to the List Settings and Permission for this list page, you can find the menu to stop inheritance.

After breaking inheritance, you can choose non-Full Control users as below and click Remove User Permissions button.

Then, the list will only have Full Control users.

Step 2. Activate the App Step feature

To use App Steps, you need to activate the Workflows can use app permissions site feature in Site settings->Manage site features as below.

Then, the App Step button in SPD will be enabled.

Step 3. Add App Step and move the logic into it

You need to find the pieces of logics which reference the ‘Web Service Keys’ list and then enclose them inside an App Step container. We have two pieces of logics we need to place inside of an App Step – Call HTTP web service action and Set RouteMap variable action, which is illustrated in the figures below:

Step 4. Publish your workflow

When you publish your workflow, the following dialog will show up to explain the behavior.

I hope you enjoyed this article and you learned about how to use App Steps appropriately. See you in the next article.

Sam Chung from the SharePoint Designer team again. Just wanted to quickly remind everyone that the SharePoint 2012 Conference is happening next week in Las Vegas! 

This is a great opportunity for the entire SharePoint Community!  You’ll get to see and hear some great presentations on everything SharePoint!

Another great plus is that there is going to be three of us from the SharePoint Designer team doing presentations!  Hyong Guk Kim, JongHwa Lim, and myself will be there.   For those of you who are going, look for us in the following sessions:

Developing SharePoint Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visio Pro 2013

Presented by JongHwa Lim and Sam Chung

Creating Custom Workflow Activities and Actions for SharePoint 2013

Presented by Hyong Guk Kim

What's New in Designing Workflows and Managing Work Requests With Project Online & Project Server 2013

Presented by Kia Amiri and Sam Chung

Looking forward to seeing a lot of you there in Vegas!

Thanks,

Sam

Sam Chung from the PM team in SPD here.  I’m happy to announce today that SharePoint Designer 2013 is now available for download here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35491

You’ve been seeing a lot of the new features we’ve announced so far in this blog and others.  Well now is the chance to download the new SPD and try it out yourself!

Thanks,

Sam

Introductions:

Hello all, my name is Sam Chung and I am a Program Manager for SharePoint Designer. I’m very proud to introduce everyone to one of our biggest investment for SharePoint Designer 2013, which is the Visual Designer.

Before we begin, I highly recommend you take a look at the MSDN articles we have setup. You can find the relevant articles here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj163272(v=office.15).aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj164055(v=office.15).aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj163971(v=office.15).aspx

The Visual Designer is a whole new workflow design surface that’s built right into SharePoint Designer 2013. For those of you who are familiar with SPD 2010, you’ll know that you could create SP 2010 workflows in Visio first, export it, and then import these diagrams into SPD 2010. And although, this did work, there were several limitations:

• No way to parameterize the different actions within Visio.
• You would always have to switch to the Text-Based Designer to set the action parameters.
• When exporting from SPD, you had no idea how your diagram might have been changed
• No way to show/use custom actions within Visio

All of these limitations are now gone, and we’ve added a bunch of new features to really make this feature shine.

How does it work?

Let’s go now and take a look at what the Visual Designer looks like. Here’s a screen shot of the actual designer:

As you can see, the Visual Designer looks like a Visio canvas showing up directly within SharePoint Designer. And in fact, this is exactly what’s going on. When SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visio 2013 Professional are installed side by side on the same machine, we will enable the new Visual Designer.

If we take a look at the screen, you can see the two different apps:

Although there are two separate apps running, we’ve integrated the two together so much, that you shouldn’t even notice that there are two separate apps. Everything should feel like it’s all happening within SPD.

How do I enable the Visual Designer?

Here are the prerequisites for using the Visual Designer

1. Install SharePoint Designer 2013 & Visio Professional on the same machine
• The Visual Designer will not work in any previous versions of SPD
• Only Visio Pro will enable the Visual Designer
2. Connect SharePoint Designer 2013 up to a SharePoint 2013 site that has the Workflow Manager setup
• The Visual Designer will not work on 2010 sites
• This is because you can’t create SharePoint 2013 workflows on SharePoint 2010 sites
• You can find more info on how to setup the Workflow Manager here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/sharepoint/jj163276(v=office.15)
3. Create a new SharePoint 2013 workflow
• The Visual Designer will only work when creating / editing SharePoint 2013 workflows
• You cannot use this feature to create / edit SharePoint 2010 workflows

Once you are certain you have all of the prerequisites you should be able to switch to the Visual Designer
at any time by clicking on the “Views” button found in the ribbon:

So what are the key take aways?

1) Able to create workflows using click and drag just like in Visio

• All of your actions are made available in the left stencil pane
• The Stencil pane automatically displays only the list of actions that are appropriate for the type of workflow you are creating.
• Custom actions will also appear in the stencil
• The pane is presorted in alphabetical order

2) Able to use “Action Tags” to set properties of different actions

• The action tag shows you the “top level” properties of an action. If you look at the same action in the Text-Based Designer, you’ll notice that some properties are shown as links in the sentence:

• These same links are shows as the options in the action tag.
• Selecting on any one of these options will bring up either the appropriate dialog for that option or the “Top Level Property grid” (more on this directly below)

3) Top Level Property grids allow you to set the properties that would only show up at the sentence
level in the Text-Based Designer.

• Similar concept to the action tags

4) You can generate Stage Level Diagrams to view the workflow at just the stage level. This is great for understanding the flow of the workflow or reporting.

• Note: The stage level diagram and the original diagram are two distinct diagrams. There is no syncing between the two.
• I will create a another blog post purely on the stage level view and it’s capabilities

5) Errors in the workflow are shown the Issues Pane:

• Notice how errors are listed in the error pane
• Both errors at the shape level and errors in the workflow property are shown here
• When you click on an error message, the associated shape is automatically highlighted
• Error checking is done whenever you try and Publish a workflow, click on the “Check for Errors” ribbon button, and when try and switch from the Visual Designer to the Text-Based Designer
• No error checking is done when you just save workflows

6) Conditional branches need to be set by right clicking on them

• Remember that all branches coming out from Conditional shapes need to be set by right clicking on each branch and selecting “Yes” or “No”

There are lots of different features within the Visual Designer which I haven’t gone over. I’ll be covering those features in future posts. For now, feel free to post any questions you may have.

Thanks,

Sam

Hi, this is JongHwa Lim from the SharePoint Design team.

Today, I will share with you a feature for creating a Ribbon button on a SharePoint server UI. This button will start a SharePoint 2013 workflow when pressed. As a matter of fact, you can achieve this by two different features which actually share many things in common – they are Quick Steps and Custom Actions. I will go with Quick Steps first which provides a more tailored user experience for this goal and then explain Custom Actions briefly.

If you are already used to Custom Actions or Quick Steps to start SharePoint 2010 workflow, then you can just try to create one to start a SharePoint 2013 workflow. Since the UX is, basically, the same, it should be easy for users who have done this before.

Quick Steps

I will explain in detail how you can create a Quick Step to start a SharePoint 2013 workflow.

Preparation

Creating a Quick Step requires some prerequisites.

First, you need to prepare a Ribbon icon file to show up in the Ribbon for the Quick Step you will define in the following steps. I decided to use the Site Assets document library and uploaded an image file there.

Second, you must have a list or document library you want to create the Quick Step in. In this example, I will use a Vacation Request list and create a quick step which starts a workflow to request an approval for the vacation.

Create a Quick Step

Now that you have the list to use, it is time to create a Quick Step. It is very easy. Just click the New Quick Step button under Customize List group in LIST Ribbon tab as highlighted below.

If you used a document library, you can find it under Customize Library group in the LIBRARY Ribbon tab as below.

Clicking the button will lead you to this dialog where you just need to choose Allow.

SPD is then launched with the Vacation Request list shown with the following dialog popped up.

Take some time to explore the UIs on this dialog. You will find that you can create a new workflow based on SharePoint 2013 Workflow or SharePoint 2010 Workflow, or use some existing workflows. You will also notice that you can define the button label and button image. As we will create a new workflow based on SharePoint 2013 Workflow, choose the Start a new workflow option and then choose SharePoint 2013 Workflow as the Platform Type. Type in ‘Vacation Approval’ for the Button Label field. Lastly, click the Browse button to locate the icon image we uploaded in the Preparation section. Your dialog should look like below:

[SC(1]

Once you click OK, a workflow designer for SharePoint 2013 Workflow will be presented as below. Feel free to complete the workflow logic. In this example, as mentioned before, we will create a Vacation Approval workflow.

Once you publish your workflow, you’ve finished creating a new Quick Step. If you go to the ITEMS Ribbon tab, you will find a new Ribbon group Quick Steps is created and a new Ribbon menu Vacation Approval is created as well.

And if you go to the list summary page for the Vacation Request list in SPD, you will find that a workflow named ‘Button – Vacation Approval’ is present and a Custom Action named ‘Vacation Approval’ is created. As a matter of fact, Quick Step is a specific kind of Custom Actions. So if you are familiar with the Custom Actions’ features, you can apply them to your Quick Steps as well.

Modify Quick Step (Advanced)

As Quick Step is a mixture of Custom Action (‘View Ribbon’ type Custom Actions) and a list workflow, you can apply some Custom Action features to modify the created Quick Step. If you click ‘Vacation Approval’ in the Custom Actions slab, the following dialog will be presented.

You can change the name of the button and even update the Quick Step to do a different job such as navigation to some forms or web pages, or starting a different workflow.

And if you scroll down a bit, you can find some advanced settings. If you use the Ribbon Location field and Sequence number field, you can change the location of the Ribbon button.

Let’s say, we want the button to show up in Workflows group rather than in Quick Steps group and want it to show up last in the group. Then you can easily achieve this by modifying the values to followings:

This will make the button show on the targeted location as below.

If you want to know more about the values available in the Ribbon Location, please refer to following article or search for some other blog articles explaining Custom Actions.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee537543.aspx

For Rights mask, you can use the values from the below site separated by semicolons to allow only permitted user to see/use the Custom Action.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spbasepermissions.aspx

Custom Actions

Let’s say now, that after you have a new Ribbon menu to start the Vacation Request workflow, you want a similar menu on the List Item Menu so that users can start a workflow by right-clicking over an item, like below:

To do this, you need to create a new Custom Action of type List Item Menu. You can find the Custom Action Ribbon button in the list summary page for the Vacation Request list in SPD. If you click it, you will be presented with the following options. In this example, please choose List Item Menu.

In the dialog that follows, please choose Initiate workflow option and select the ‘Button – Vacation Approval’ workflow which was created during the creation of Quick Step so that two UIs will start the same workflow. And Click OK.

That’s it. You created the menu. If you go to the Vacation Request list, choose one item, and see the list item menu, you can find it.

Known Issue

There are some known issues for the Quick Steps and Custom Actions feature.

• After starting the workflow, it goes to the site default page rather than to the list
• Following option in workflow summary page is turned off by default for the workflow created from Quick Steps
  
• If you click the New button from the Custom Actions slab, it automatically creates a View Ribbon type Custom Action

My name is Sam Chung, and I am a Program Manager for SharePoint Designer.  I’d like to introduce everyone to a great new feature we’ve introduced in SharePoint Designer 2013.  For those of you who work with Project Server Workflows, you’ll be aware that ALL previous versions of Project Server workflows were only created using Visual Studio.  Well, this is no longer the case in Office 2013.  The SharePoint Designer team has partnered up with the Project team to create a great seamless integration of the two products.

Now, luckily for me, our partner team Project has already gone ahead and created a blog posting on how  you can use SPD for exactly this, and as such, all I  have to do is link to their blog.

So without further ado, please point your browsers to the below link and read all about this great new feature.

https://blogs.office.com/b/project/archive/2012/09/18/demand-management-sharepoint-designer-project-server.aspx

Thanks,

Sam

My name is Sam Chung, and I’m a PM here at SharePoint Designer.  In this blog we’re going to talk about a great new scenario we’ve fully enabled now with the Import/Export feature found in the Visual Designer.

Introduction:

For many developers, there comes a special time in their lives when a strong need will arise, a need to spread their workflows. In particular, it will be the need to move their workflows between sites. This need can arise for many reasons, with the more common reason being the need to move a workflow between development, staging, and production environments. But whatever the reason may be, I’d like to use this article to help you guys out when trying to move your workflows from one site to another.

Before I begin though, please make sure to read over the following articles:

The first is a general overview of the Visual Designer:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163272%28office.15%29.aspx

You will need to read the above article to understand how the Visual Designer works.

The next is an article on how to package your lists and your workflows using our packaging feature:

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2012/08/30/packaging-list-site-and-reusable-workflow-and-how-to-deploy-the-package.aspx

You will need to understand the above article in order to understand how to package whatever lists your workflow may be referencing.

Creating your Workflow

Your workflow can be pretty much any workflow. There is no technical limitation in terms of what you can move. However, please take note of the following points if you want to avoid publishing and run-time issues:

1. Make sure that all objects that are being referenced in your workflow exist in the target site.

a. Read the packaging article to figure out how to package your lists

2. Make sure that all actions that are being used in your source site exist on the target site

a. If you have any custom actions which exist on your source site, you must make sure to bring those over to your target site before you bring over your workflow

3. Moving Project Workflows from a PWA site to a non-PWA site is not possible.

a. SPD will block this during import if it detects a Project workflow being imported into a non-PWA site.

b. We have a lot of extra data in a Project workflow and as such, these should only be moved from a PWA site to another PWA site

For this blog, I’m going to use a fairly simple workflow as an example. I will be enabling an Ideas list for an event scenario. The workflow I am going to create will be a simple workflow that will be used on an “Event Ideas” list. Users will enter in a new list item for every event idea that they have. Once they’ve filled in all of the required information, they will indicate that the item is ready for review. At that point, the workflow will kickoff and ask certain approvers to approve or reject the idea.

The list I’ll be using is this one:

You can see how this list has the following columns:

· Event Idea

o Single Line String

· Location

o Single Line String· Cost

o Currency

· Status

o Choice Field

And the workflow itself looks like this:

Here is what the workflow is doing:

· Log to history that we’re in the first stage

· Check to see if the Status column field is set to “Ready for Review”

o  If it’s not, wait until it is set to “Ready for Review”

· Log to history that we’re now assigning tasks to review the idea

· Update the status column to “Under Review”

· Assign tasks out

· If the idea was approved, we’ll come to this stage where we’ll log to the history that the idea was approved

· Set the Status column to “Accepted”

· If the idea was rejected, we’d come to this stage where we’ll log to the history that the idea was rejected

· Set the status column to “Rejected”

Exporting the Workflow

Now that we have our workflow, let’s go ahead and export this guy out. We do this by doing clicking on
the “Export to Visio” ribbon button.

NOTE: Pressing the Export button will automatically save your workflow first to the server and then start the export feature. The reason for this is because we need to ensure the exported workflow is in-sync with the server version at the time of export.

Pressing that button will bring up the following dialog:

Select where you’d like to save the file and press the “Save” button.

This will now have saved your Visio diagram to your selected location. If you so wish, you can open the diagram right away in Visio 2013.

Note: In this example, we exported the workflow from the Visual Designer, but it is possible to export your workflow from the following places:

· Text-Based Designer

· Workflow Settings Page

· Workflow Gallery

But in all of these examples, you must have the Visual Designer enabled. And in order for this to happen you must have Visio 2013 Professional installed on the same machine as SharePoint Designer 2013.

Importing In the Workflow

Now that you have exported your workflow, you can now open up another SharePoint 2013 site in SharePoint Designer 2013 and import in your workflow. Here are the steps you will take:

1. Connect SPD to a new site

2. Click on “Workflows” in the navigation pane

3. Press the bottom half of the “Import from Visio” ribbon button, and select the “Import Visio 2013 Diagram” option

4. This will bring up a regular Open File dialog. Go find your exported diagram and open it.

5. This will bring up the “Create Workflow” dialog

a. Give your workflow a name

b. Give it a description if you want

c. Notice how the Workflow Type is greyed out to “List Workflow”. This is because SPD has detected that the imported workflow is a list workflow. And as such, it has automatically selected the correct workflow type. If you were importing in a fresh new diagram from Visio (A workflow that has never been in SPD), this option would have been enabled.

d. Since this is a List Workflow, the option to select which list to associate the workflow to is enabled. Go ahead and select a list.  This option is only enabled for List Workflows. Ideally, you would have exported and imported in your List as well, in which case, you could just select the same list you were working on in the previous site.

e. Press OK

6. This will now bring up your workflow diagram, exactly as you saw it before.

a. All of your workflow logic has been retained

b. All of your action properties have been retained

c. All of your local variables have been retained

7. You can now go ahead and continue editing your workflow. But before you publish, make sure you read the next section.

Post Deployment Work Before Publishing

Once you’ve imported in your workflow from a different site, you cannot go ahead and try to publish it right away. Although this might work without any errors, your workflow will almost surely fail during run-time. Once you’ve imported in your workflow, make sure you do/check the next following steps:

1. Go to your workflow settings page, and update the Task List and History List

a. If you take a look at it now, you’ll see how it says “New Task List” and “New History List”. However, due to a late breaking change, when you publish your workflow, it will not make new Task and History lists. Which will cause your workflow to error out on runtime.

b. There should already be existing Task and History lists you can choose. Go ahead and choose those.

Note: If you really do want to create a new Task or History list, just click on a different list first, and then re-select the New Task List or New History List option. This will then bring up popups that will ask you if you really want to create a new list. And once you’ve confirmed that you want to create new lists, SPD will create these new lists right away.

2. Fix up your Lookups

a. If you did not bring over your lists with your VSDX file, you are most likely associating your workflow to a totally different list. As such, if you were referencing any list items or properties, you might need to fix those up.

b. You can get around this if you package your list from your original site and deploy it to the new site before you import in your workflow. To learn more about packaging your list, see this blog: Packaging List, Site, and Reusable Workflow and How to Deploy the Package

3. Check for any custom actions in your Workflow that don’t exist in your new site

a. If you do have custom actions in your workflow, make sure you deploy those actions onto your new site before you import in this workflow.

4. For Project Workflows: Make sure you’ve brought over your Stages, Phases, PDPs, and Custom Fields before you import in your workflow.

a. Project Workflows require that all of the previous Project Objects have been brought over from the old site to the new site. Take a look at the Project Blogs to find out more about how to move your Project Objects.

Once you have taken care of these issues, you should have no problem publishing and running your workflow on your new site!

Hope this article was of use to you. Feel free to leave comments below.

Thanks,

Sam

Hello SharePoint Designer users,

I’m Chong Youn (John) Choe, a PM in the SharePoint Designer team. It makes me very happy to post an article on a new issue.

Background

Approval is one of the key applications of workflow. A couple of actions are provided in SharePoint Designer 2013 to receive participant’s response. In SharePoint Designer 2013, task forms are auto-generated based upon a certain Content Type, so it is worthwhile to learn how to customize the content type for those who are interested in customizing the task form in your workflows.

Example Scenario

Chris Bryant, a designer of Contoso, wants to have feedback on the new product model design he presented last night. Default Start a Task Process action is only suitable for getting an approval or a rejection response from the participants he selects, as such, he decides to modify the task form to better fit into the need of collecting feedback.

Custom Content Type Creation

First, a custom content type needs to be created in the site. It can be done either the SharePoint server side or SharePoint Designer client side.

For the Server side do the following:

1. Go to Site Content Type page

Go to Site Settings, and select Site Content Types in the Web Designer Galleries section. On the Site Content Types page, choose Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) in List Content Types.

Figure 1 Site settings menu

Figure 2 Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013)

2. Create a site content type which inherits the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) content type.

Go back to the Site Content Types page and press the Create link. Set its name, description, and then set its Parent Content Type as the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) content type. Setting the parent content type to the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) content type is a required step in order to use your new custom content type. Choose or introduce a Content Type Group and press OK.

Figure 3 Set Parent Content Type

3. Add the new Content Type to your Tasks list.

Click on Settings, and then click on the back to site home and go to Site Contents option and then click on your Tasks list.

Figure 4 Tasks button

Choose the List tab in the ribbon, and click List Settings. Scroll down to locate the Content Types section, and press the Add from existing site content types option to add the newly created content type.

Figure 5 Content Types session in List Settings

The same work can be done even easier on SharePoint Designer,

1. Go to the Content Types menu under the Site Objects tab in the Navigation pane. All the Content Types in the site will be displayed. Create a site content type by pressing the Content Type button

Figure 6 Content Types menu in SharePoint Designer

2. Choose the name for your new content type and select a sorting group for it. Make sure that the parent content type is the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) content type as depicted in figure 7.

Figure 7 Create a Content Type dialog

3. Next, add the content type into your Tasks list, this is required in order to use it in the Task Actions. Go to your Tasks list under List and Libraries under Site Objects in the Navigation tab again. Afterwards, add the newly created content type into the Tasks list.

Figure 8 Content Types Picker on SharePoint Designer

Without adding the content type in the Tasks list, the following run time error will occur.
Figure 9 Run time error

Using either method to creating your Custom Content Type will make it available in the workflow.

The Outcome option column is the column that will hold all of the possible responses each participant can select. Any custom content type created by the above steps will be shown in the Start a Task Process and Assign a Task actions.

Custom Content Type Modification

When adding a Start a Task Process or Assign a Task action, the new Content Type will be displayed in the Task action’s designer type.

Once it’s confirmed that the Custom Content Type has been created and is usable by the workflow, let’s start working on how to customize the form.

A very simple workflow to collect feedback is depicted in figure 10.

Figure 10 Collect Feedback Workflow

Chris, Contoso’s designer, wants to receive feedback from an internal expert group hence the form should be modified to store comments from each participant.

1) Go to the Site Settings page, and open Site content types in Web Designer Galleries

2) Click on the Custom Content Type under List Content Types

Figure 11 Contoso Content Type

At this point, the task form’s look will be the same as the default task form. Which looks like figure 11.

Many fields in the default form are useless in this scenario. For Chris, the following fields may be modified in the Content type.

Let’s examine all the fields one by one in figure 11, Contoso Content Type, to decide if they are needed in our task form.

1) Task Name is a Required field

2) Start Date/Due Date may be meaningful but is not something we have to have in our form

3) Assigned To field is not required in the form since the participants will be editing the form assigned to them already

4) % Complete is pointless since the feedback is normally given all at once

5) The Body field will be used to gather the feedback

6) Predecessors is not needed here

7) Priority has nothing to do with feedback

8) Task Status is a basic field that tracks the status

9) Related Items are not needed in this form

10) Task Outcome is a choice of outcomes, in this case a simple “Submit” option is all that’s needed to finish the feedback process.

The column manipulation pages look all alike, an example screenshot is below.

When a field is set to Required, the column needs to be filled in order to close the task form, while Optional columns are displayed but can be left blank. Either taking the Hidden setting or removing the column by the Remove button will hide the column from the task form. For example, in the below screenshot, pressing the Remove button will erase the Assigned To field from the Contoso Content Type.

Figure 13 Change Content Type Column

Chris has gone ahead and modified the Contoso Content Type so that it will be used purely for feedback.

The results are displayed in figure 14. The Related items column is hidden since it cannot be removed.

Figure 14 Contoso Content Type modified

In addition, the Task Outcome site colun is used in the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) Content Type. It is best to remove the Task Outcome column and create a new site column of Outcome choice type by clicking on Add from a new site column.

Figure 15 Task Form Contoso Content Type modified

When each participant receives a task based on the form above, the review can be written in the description field and the task can be completed by pressing the Submit button. Remaining columns such as Start Date could be hidden, too.

After this, it is also okay to rename the fields as Chris wishes. For instance, in order to change the name of the outcome field Submit, choose the Submit column and press Edit column link in the Site Column information. The column name can be renewed there, as depicted in figure 17. Note that the new name for the column can be non-ascii character based such as “テスト”.

Figure 16 Edit Column

Figure 17 Site Column Information

Limitations

SharePoint 2013 workflows with SharePoint Designer 2013 will generate task forms by analyzing the associated Content Type. Please note that InfoPath is not supported for SharePoint 2013 workflows. Which means that in order to modify the layout users need to directly manipulate the .aspx format.

Despite the modifications explained already, the Save and Cancel buttons cannot be manipulated from SharePoint or SharePoint Designer. What’s more, the Task Status and Task Outcome type columns need to exist in a content type in order for the custom outcome buttons to appear. The order of the buttons follow the order of the choice values in the Task Outcome type columns included in the content type. The Task Outcome type columns are defined as Site Columns under Site Settings.

Figure 18 Additional Column Settings example for a Task Outcome type column

Summary

Two new actions are introduced in SharePoint 2013 workflows. The task form for the actions are modifiable from SharePoint sites and from the SharePoint Designer client without any developer level knowledge. Create a new Custom Content type that inherits the Workflow Task (SharePoint 2013) Content type, add it to your Tasks list, use the new content type in your workflow, and modify the Custom Content type as needed.

Additional customizations of the form are possible by modifying the .aspx format, but that is out of scope for this blog.

I hope with this simple technic presented here to you can enable the workflow scenarios you have.

See you again in the next posting!

Chong Youn (John) Choe

Hello all, my name is HyongGuk Kim, a Senior Program Manager on the SharePoint Designer team.

In this blog I’m going to talk about how we can easily write a SharePoint 2013 workflow which consumes public or commercial HTTP (REST) web service and how we can simply make it run as a service that sends daily emails by looping.

As you can see in the below video clip, we will build a site workflow named "eBay Daily Deals", which will read the daily deal information from eBay^TM , create deal items in a SharePoint Promoted Links list, and then sends emails to people who want to receive this deal information.

Since the "eBay Daily Deals" workflow is a site workflow, the first thing you have to do is to create a new SharePoint 2013 site workflow. Once the site workflow is created, you simply add three stages, name them properly, and then link them using Go To actions.

Stage 1

Name Stage 1 “Get eBay Daily Deals” and then add four actions and one Loop block, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Workflow stage 1

The first action we added is a Call HTTP Web Service action. The HTTP URI is set to https://www.firstamong.com/json/index.php?q=https://deals.ebay.com/feeds/xml and the HTTP method is set to “GET”. It would have been great to just use one of eBay’s REST web services which returns JSON but due to an annoying header inside eBay's REST web service outcome we had to use an extra transformer web service (Note that there are a couple of transformer services available. In our case we used a service from www.firstamong.com) which calls eBay's another REST web service which returns XML and returns clean JSON objects to us.

In the "Call HTTP Web Service" action statement we do not set RequestContent or RequestHeaders parameter because we don’t need to. We are only interested in the output of that web service. By simply setting the response parameter to a variable ResponseContent, the output of this web service call will get stored in the variable ResponseContent, which is a dictionary type variable.

The JSON output of the transformer web service which called eBay's XML web service looks like this:

{"EbayDailyDeals":

  {"Item":[

{"ItemId":"221065015062","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NDI4WDUxMA==\/$(KGrHqJHJBwE8+9eOVMzBPZ1lhNt!g~~60_1.JPG","SmallPictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NDI4WDUxMA==\/$(KGrHqJHJBwE8+9eOVMzBPZ1lhNt!g~~60_1.JPG","Picture175Url":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NDI4WDUxMA==\/$(KGrHqJHJBwE8+9eOVMzBPZ1lhNt!g~~60_1.JPG","Title":"Acer ICONIA 7in Tablet 8GB WiFi","Description":"N\/A","DealURL":"http:\/\/deals.ebay.com\/5000101083_Acer_ICONIA_7in _Tablet_8GB_WiFi","ConvertedCurrentPrice":"139.99","PrimaryCategoryName":"Computers\/Tablets & Networking:iPads, Tablets & eBook Readers","PrimaryCategoryId":"171485","Location":"Miami, Florida","Quantity":"128","QuantitySold":"372","MSRP":"299.99","SavingsRate":"53%","AutoPay":"true","Hot":"false","Tier":"0","PriceDisplay":"MSRP"},

{"ItemId":"271012700385","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/MzYwWDM2MA==\/$(KGrHqR,!ioE-w!y!T--BPto5nEk0!~~60_1.JPG","SmallPictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/MzYwWDM2MA==\/$(KGrHqR,!ioE-w!y!T--BPto5nEk0!~~60_1.JPG","Picture175Url":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/MzYwWDM2MA==\/$(KGrHqR,!ioE-w!y!T--BPto5nEk0!~~60_1.JPG","Title":"Sylvania Wireless CE 7-Inch Smartbook - SYNET7WIC","Description":"N\/A","DealURL":"http:\/\/deals.ebay.com\/5000101099_Sylvania_Wireless_CE_7_Inch_Smartbook___SYNET7WIC","ConvertedCurrentPrice":"49.99","PrimaryCategoryName":"Computers\/Tablets & Networking:Laptops & Netbooks:PC Laptops & Netbooks","PrimaryCategoryId":"177","Location":"US","Quantity":"1307","QuantitySold":"693","MSRP":"199.99","SavingsRate":"75%","AutoPay":"true","Hot":"false","Tier":"0","PriceDisplay":"MSRP"},

{"ItemId":"160823596564","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NjAwWDM1MQ==\/$(KGrHqFHJFQE+T-

...

"MoreDeals":

   {"MoreDealsSection":[

    {"SectionTitle":"Emergency Preparedness","Item":[

{"ItemId":"200687021159","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NDI5WDUwMA==\/$(KGrHqV,!p0E-vF(Fmt0BP7iH6)M6g~~60_1.JPG","SmallPictureURL":"http:\/\/thumbs4.ebaystatic.com\/pict\/200687021159_1.jpg","Picture175Url":"http:\/\/thumbs4.ebaystatic.com\/pict\/200687021159_1.jpg","Title":"DuroMax 1500 Watt Portable Pull Start Gas Power Job Site Electric Generator","Description":"NA","DealURL":"http:\/\/deals.ebay.com\/5000099668_DuroMax_1500_Watt_Portable_Pull_Start_Gas_Power_Job_Site_Electric_Generator","ConvertedCurrentPrice":"179.99","PrimaryCategoryName":"Home & Garden:Tools:Generators: Home-Use","PrimaryCategoryId":"46412","Location":"La Verne","Quantity":"302","QuantitySold":"228","MSRP":"299.99","SavingsRate":"40%","AutoPay":"true","Hot":"false","Tier":"0","PriceDisplay":"MSRP"},

{"ItemId":"370622857968","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/MTAwMFgxMDAw\/$T2eC16h,!)0E9s37IeSMBP7IWFtFqw~~60_12.JPG","SmallPictureURL":"http:\/\/thumbs1.ebaystatic.com\/pict\/370622857968_1.jpg","Picture175Url":"http:\/\/thumbs1.ebaystatic.com\/pict\/370622857968_1.jpg","Title":"Dorcy High Beam LED Aluminum Flashlight 100 Lumens Water Resistant 41-4287","Description":"NA","DealURL":"http:\/\/deals.ebay.com\/5000099680_Dorcy_High_Beam_LED_Aluminum_Flashlight_100_Lumens_Water_Resistant_41_4287","ConvertedCurrentPrice":"11.99","PrimaryCategoryName":"Sporting Goods:Outdoor Sports:Camping & Hiking:Flashlights, Lanterns & Lights:Flashlights","PrimaryCategoryId":"16037","Location":"Altatac USA","Quantity":"1899","QuantitySold":"1113","MSRP":"49.99","SavingsRate":"76%","AutoPay":"false","Hot":"false","Tier":"0","PriceDisplay":"MSRP"},

{"ItemId":"300725740900","EndTime":"1341845999000","PictureURL":"http:\/\/i.ebayimg.com\/00\/s\/NTAwWDUwMA==\/

...

By the way, to handle each internal item we could also have used a DealItems variable so that we can put our action statement like “Get ([%Variable: Index%])/Title from Variable: DealItems” to get item’s Title property. However, just to make it things simple and to show a clear structure of deal items inside web service output, I put full path to access item’s properties. So having the statement like “Get EbayDailyDeals/Item([%Variable: Index%])/Title from Variable: ResponseContent“ (not Variable: DealItems) will retrieve Title property of an item. For more information on using dictionary type please refer to the links provided at the bottom of this blog.

Figure 2 shows how we retrieve all the different properties of each internal items.

Figure 2. Retrieving properties of deal items and creating promotion link items

With the Get item from Dictionary action we store every property of each deal item into a workflow variable and then use them when we create a list item at the later part of Loop block. Most of variable types we are using in this "retrieve" process are of type string but you can notice that we are using other types too.

For more information on using dictionary type please refer to the links provided at the end of this blog.

Figure 3. Local variables

We also use the Replace String action to work-around a SharePoint limitation where we can't use ',' or '!' characters in a URL type data.

And at the end of the Loop block there are two Step blocks where we build the Email content and increment the index variable by one. The two main scenarios of this workflow are to create list items using the outcome of the eBay web service and then to send Emails to people who want to receive "eBay Daily Deals" information. As such, we are building an HTML fragment inside the Loop block as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Two steps in Loop block

You can see that the workflow variables we used to create the list items are all being reused in building the HTML fragment as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Building HTML fragment for Email body

Stage 2

The workflow logic in Stage 2 is exactly the same as the workflow logic in Stage 1 except for one statement which calls web service in Stage 1 (see the circled statement in Figure 6). As such, you can easily create Stage 2 by just copying and pasting the content of Stage1 into Stage 2.

Stage 2 will read an additional section within the eBay’s Daily Deals web service output. Therefore, we can use the same logic but use a different path when trying to retrieve the Item array from the above big JSON output.

Figure 6. Workflow stage 2

And this means we need to use a different path for accessing items in “MoreDealsSection”, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7. Getting more deal items in MoreDealsSection

Everything else is exactly the same.

Stage 3

In Stage 1 and Stage 2 we created list items and also built the HTML fragments to use when sending Emails later. Stage 3 is the place where we will send emails and thus has only one action, the Send Email action as shown in Figure 8. “Subscribers” is the SharePoint group where all the site members who want to receive Daily Deals Email are added as members.

Figure 8. Workflow stage 3

You can compose a complete Email body in HTML in the property grid dialog of the Send Email action as shown below. Since we already have a complex HTML table code fragment in the variable EmailContent, we only have to put a few wrapper tags around that variable lookup, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. Building a complete Email body

This is it! You are now completely ready to publish and start this workflow.

Just make sure you have an "eBay Daily Deals" list in your site and it should be a "Promoted Links" type list which is a new cool list type in SharePoint 2013. You can easily find this list app when you click Add an app from the Settings link which is in the right top corner of your site root page.

Start the Workflow

When you start this workflow you will see the workflow creating eBay Daily Deal items in your "eBay Daily Deals" list and you will also notice that you have Emails being sent from this workflow.

Figure 10. eBay Daily Deals promoted links list

Figure 11. Email sent from workflow

Loop Back?

We saw how we can build a good site workflow which sends Email with eBay Daily Deals information in it. What if we want to receive this email “every day”? Will it be possible to have this workflow run repeatedly every 24 hours?

Yes! As shown below by adding a Pause for Duration action and changing the target of the Go To statement inside of Stage 3 to point back to Stage 1, this workflow will now work like a service which will retrieve eBay's Daily Deals items and will then send these deals as Email every day.

Sounds fun, right?

Figure 12. Looping back to the beginning

References

Here are references where you can find more information on the dictionary type and workflow actions which handle dictionary variables and HTTP web services.

SharePoint Designer 2013 Help Content

• MSDN: Understanding Dictionary actions in SharePoint Designer 2013
• MSDN: Calling HTTP web service with Dictionary (this content is not yet available)

Hello. This is JongHwa Lim – a Program Manager from SharePoint Designer (aka. SPD) team.

Today I’d like to introduce a feature which has been enhanced a lot from SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. It is the workflow package feature. A very common scenario for those who used this feature in SharePoint Designer 2010, was to develop one workflow in a development environment and then deploy it to a production environment. Unfortunately, the bad news was that this was supported only for reusable workflow types in SharePoint Designer 2010.

In SharePoint Designer 2013 along with SharePoint Server 2013 and Azure Workflow Service, we now support all three workflow types – list workflow, site workflow, and reusable workflow. This is superb. This means you don’t have to confine yourself only to the reusable workflow and the old story that you had to migrate your list workflows to reusable workflows for this purpose are all now gone.

An example will help tell this story much better. I will build a sample workflow and show how it can be reused in a target site.

Example: a Vacation Request list workflow

Let’s say you are going to create a list workflow on a development environment. The workflow has two lists – Vacation list and Vacation Request list. Vacation list keeps the number of remaining vacations for all the employees and Vacation Request list is where the requestor will create a request item to request approval for vacation.

Create necessary lists (development environment)

As said, we need two lists so I created two lists as below. Note that we will use the default settings for the ‘Task List’ and ‘History List’.

Create list workflow on Vacation Request list

Now that you have the necessary lists ready, use SPD to connect to the server, click ‘List Workflow’, and then choose ‘Vacation Request’ list. You will be shown a dialog below and make sure you choose ‘SharePoint 2013 Workflow’ type after you type in the workflow name.

Fill in the logic and Publish the workflow

In the SPD canvas, you can choose text-based designer or if Visio Professional is installed you can choose the visual designer to author the workflow. In this blog, I will use the text-based designer but if you are interested in the visual designer, please refer to another blog post on the visual designer, which will be available soon.

Please add the following logic. In general, it is very straight-forward except for a couple points. It consists of five stages. Each stage’s title explains what it is for but to explain it in more detail, I’ve described them below:

• ‘Check if remaining vacation exists’ stage – fetch the remaining vacation days for the initiator and compare it to the requested vacation days
• ‘Approval Process’ stage – request approval for the requested vacation days
• ‘Approved’ stage – when approved, update the Vacation list with the new calculated value
• ‘Rejected’ stage – send rejection mail
• ‘insufficient vacation’ stage – send mail on the insufficient remaining vacation days

The tricky parts are these lookup UIs to fetch the remaining vacation days from Vacation list or to update the Vacation list.

You can opt to turn on ‘auto start by item creation’ option if it makes more sense.

And when you publish the workflow the workflow association will be created and the status column will be made behind the scenes.

Package the lists into STP packages

There are several ways by which you can guarantee that the target server has the necessary lists and schemas but leveraging STP package is a good practice. So let’s package Vacation list and Vacation Request list into a STP packages.

You can do this via either server UI or SPD UI as shown below.

Then, you will see the following screen where you can type in the name and choose to package the contents as well.

Note that SharePoint 2013 list workflow is not packaged together whether you choose to ‘Include Content’ or not.

And if successful, it will guide you to a place where you can download the package.

Click the link and download the package for later use.

If successful, you must have two STP packages now, one package for the Vacation Request list and another for the Vacations list (the list that contains the remaining vacation days).

Package the workflow into WSP package

To package the list workflow, go to the workflow summary page and click the ‘Save as Template’ button in the Ribbon.

The following dialog will be shown.

You can find ‘Site Assets’ library in the Navigation pane and you can find the list workflow package in it. (You may need to refresh the page to see the package.)

Use the ‘Export File’ Ribbon button to save it to the local machine.

Deploy the STP packages

Open the target site(or production environment) in your browser and go to ‘Site Settings’. You can find ‘List templates’ menu under ‘Web Designer Galleries’ group.

Using the ‘Upload Document’ under ‘Files’ menu, upload the two STP packages.

Create lists using the deployed list templates

You can create the two lists from the deployed list templates. Go to ‘Site Contents’ in the navigation menu in the server and click ‘add an app’. You should be able to find ‘Vacation’ and ‘Vacation Request’ icons.

Create ‘Vacation’ and ‘Vacation Request’ lists using those menus.

Deploy the WSP package and activate the package

Deploying WSP package is a bit different from deploying STP list templates. You must upload it to ‘Solutions’ library under ‘Web Designer Galleries’ group in Site Settings.

Then, you will be prompted with a dialog where you need to activate the package(solution).

Activate the Feature

After activating the solution, you will see there is a new site feature in ‘Manage site features’ under ‘Site Actions’ of Site Settings.

This is it. You can find this workflow by the name you used when you packaged it. Click the ‘Activate’ button and wait until the button changes to ‘Deactivate’ or the ‘Active’ icon is shown, which will mean that the feature is activated.

(Optional) Open the workflow from SPD

There are cases when you want to update the workflow in the target site. No problem. It is just the same as your development environment. You can find the deployed workflow correctly listed in SPD.

And it will open without any issues. You can see that the values in the summary page remain the same. And of course, the logic is preserved as well.

(Optional) Run the workflow

After you run the workflow from the server, you may find that there are two columns with the same name(workflow status column). This is a known issue. One column comes from the source server(packaged in STP) and the other column is created in the target site. Please update the list view to hide the old column.

What is the alternative to using STP package?

The solution will be properly deployed as long as the target site has the necessary lists – lists that are used in the workflow logic along with the Workflow Task and Workflow History lists. But it is best to create the lists and list columns referenced in the workflow using the same list template and same field type. If there is a type mismatch, the package can fail during the feature activation time or the workflow will fail at runtime.

What happens if the workflow package is deployed to a site where ‘Vacation’ or ‘Vacation Request’ lists don’t exist?

The site feature activation will fail.

The error message is not very detailed but if you look at the ULS log, you can find some hints like the following:

“Workflow XAML failed validation due to the following errors: Failed to create a 'ListId' from the text '$ListId:Lists/Vacation;”

But once the feature activation has failed, re-activation of the feature may fail again even after you create the necessary lists. This is because your workflow definition is deployed incompletely. You need to do the following:

• Open SPD and delete the workflow definition which failed during feature activation
• Deactivate the solution and remove the solution
• Upload the solution and activate the solution
• Activate the site feature

This should solve the problem.

Known Issues

These are the known issues of workflow package.

• You need to guarantee that the relative list urls (eg. ‘Lists/Vacation’) are the same. Even if you create a list with a given name and then change it to a different name, the list url will not change, this is because it is based on the original display name. As such, even though you packaged the workflow based on the list’s updated name, the workflow will still look for a list url based on the old name in the target site. Therefore, when you are recreating the lists in the target site, you must make sure that you initially give the lists the original name, and not the updated name. This way the list url will be preserved. After the list is created, you can change the list’s name to the updated one.
• Workflows with Unicode or DBCS names will be packaged into wsp files with the default hard-coded name of ‘WorkflowSolution.wsp’
• You need to manually refresh the page after you go to Site Assets to see the updated list of solutions.
• If the target server doesn’t have the Workflow Task list and Workflow History list, the below error can show up when you click on the workflow from the Workflow Settings page. This happens when you deploy the workflow to a target server where no workflows has ever been created before. As a workaround, you can create and publish a dummy workflow from SPD to create the Workflow Task list and Workflow History list. And then you can open the deployed workflow from SPD, adjust the Workflow Task list and Workflow History list settings and republish the workflow.
• Project workflow will be packaged like a regular site workflow. But to guarantee it works, you need to also package project entities such as EPT, Stages, custom columns, and so on. Please refer to the project workflow guideline which will be provided by the Project team.

Thanks,

JongHwa