Transitioning the Blogs

As a reader of this blog, you know there are three things that I care about and write about: Travel, Gadgets, and Captaris. But most of you are interested in only one of those topics. Well, at the recent Captaris International Partner Conference I was invited to start blogging on the Captaris Developer Portal and saw this as a chance to move one of the audiences to a place that is more relevant to them. So starting now all posts about Captaris Workflow, Rightfax, and Alchemy will be posted on my new blog at the Captaris Developer Portal. On the site I am TrainerMatt and my blog is: http://www.captaris.com/DeveloperProgram/blogs/trainermatt_blog/default.aspx

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Resize a webform automatically

When designing a workflow in Captaris Workflow, one of your options is to use WebForms for all the UI. When doing this, we will usually open the form to some less than useful size and the enduser will usually resize the form to be able to use it. Resizing the form automatically is easy enough to do, but I always forget what the JavaScript should look like to do that. So here it is...just stick this in the PageLoad method and set the size to the right size for that form. Easy... Hopefully next time I need it, I won't have to search for 10 minutes for this no-brainer...

Page.RegisterClientScriptBlock("tpCustomScript",

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Captaris Workflow - Getting the Overdue Event to Fire

One of the common questions I get from Captaris customers is how to get the overdue event to fire. The reason this question comes up is that some of our method names are downright confusing, and I think we changed something here because it doesn't look the same as I remember it.

In Captaris Workflow, there are a series of events that fire on any given task: Ready, Execute, Overdue, Failed, Reset, and Complete. Ready fires when the task is ready, but nothing has been done. Execute means a task has started but not necessarily finished. Overdue means the time alloted to complete the task has passed, but its not complete yet. Failed means something went wrong. Reset happens when the task is reset by the owner or administrator. And Complete means the task is complete and moves on to the next. At each one of these events, something can happen...anything you want.

There are two ways to set when that overdue event fires. By default, the task becomes overdue 1 year after it becomes ready. Usually you will want to change that. The easiest way is to drag the Set Overdue Date custom action on to the Ready event of the task and set it to the relative date it will be overdue. This will be Now plus some amount of time. There is no coding required to do this. But sometimes you will want a bit more flexibility that what this offers. For that, use the SetReminderForOverdueEvent method. It expects a DateTime, so just give it a time for when the overdue event should fire.

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Using PowerShell to Admin Captaris Workflow

The other day I started looking into using PowerShell to help manage Captaris Workflow. The toughest part about coming up with any administration tool is imagining all the different tasks people might want to accomplish. One of the wonderful things about Powershell is that you don’t have to really know the details of how users want to manipulate the information. All you need to do is give the basic building blocks that can then be piped together to make something amazing. That was always the cool thing about piping commands in Unix. None of the individual utilities did much, but when piped together you could get amazing things done.

Anyway, one of the common tasks that Captaris Workflow admins like to do is to move old processes to an archive folder. We can do that via the GUI, but it is a multiple step process. So I created two simple Powershell scripts that will move any file, folder, process, or model from one location to another based on name, id, date modified, date created, owner, original location, and more. And to make it even better the two scripts together add up to 15 lines of code. If you only count the unique lines, its down to 9 lines.

So first off we want to get the list of records off the Workflow Server:

param($user=$(Throw "A user is required..."),$pwd="")
[void][System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("TeamplateBLL") |out-null
$s = New-Object Teamplate.BLL.BSession
$s.Connect($user,$pwd)

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A Better Sharepoint Web Part for showing Workflow Tasks

In my most recent Captaris Workflow class in Bendigo one of the students asked about solving a problem with our implementation of our Sharepoint Web Part. The issue was that we have one web part that does everything. This is great if you want it to do everything, but sometimes you just want a task list like the one that shows up in our web access product. Well, its actually really easy to create one in less than 10 minutes. The one shown in the picture shows my task list, the processes they come from, and the due date. Since my locale is US, I have US dates. If I had a different locale, they would be shown correctly for the locale.

To get this web part, first take a look at the full WebAccess client.

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Workflow: One out of two, part two

One of my other colleagues thought my suggestion was a bad idea. I agree…for the exact scenario I described, I may have over engineered the problem and solution. An easier way to solve this particular problem would be to simply assign the task to two people. The first one to approve finishes that task and the workflow moves on. But what if you actually want one of two paths of tasks

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Workflow: Getting one out of two to approve...

Yesterday a colleague asked me a question about a simple scenario in Captaris Workflow. Here it is: You have a simple workflow with 4 steps. The first leads to two in parallel, then both of those lead to the fourth. The two in parallel are approvers, perhaps of a document. You only need one approval to move forward. By default, Workflow requires approval from both to move forward, so how can you arrange it so only the one approval is required? It all comes down to the Business Rule Action.

First of lets create our test workflow. I drag and drop four webform tasks onto the canvas and name them First Task through Fourth Task. Now link all the tasks as shown:

Now create two webforms. One should just be the basic default form with the submit buttons. For the other, add a pair of radio buttons in the same group, and label them True and False. Create a single XML element called Approved, then bind that to the True Radio Button. Drag and drop the basic webform to the First and Fourth tasks and the other one to the Second and Third tasks. Note that so far we have done NO coding, just drag and drop, and clicking a few times.

If we run the workflow now, nothing special will happen. When we approve the second task, the workflow will wait for the third task to complete, but that's not what our scenario demanded. So now we need to add an action to both the Second and Third tasks. From the Toolbox, drag and drop the Business Rule Action to the Complete event on those two tasks. Specify that the Business Rule should check to see if the Approved XML element has been set to True. Now here comes our one line of code. Right-click on the canvas and choose the script view. For the code block for the Second Task Complete event, add the following line:

ThirdTask.WorkflowAdvance(True)

Add the corresponding line for the ThirdTask Complete event as well (OK, there are two lines of code, but it’s pretty much the same line so it doesn't really count).

Now if we run the workflow and choose False on the Second (or Third Task), the other of the two will have to run. If we choose True, then the other task doesn't have to run and it goes straight to the Fourth task.

This is a simple use of the Business Rule Action. If you look closely at the action that gets dropped on your canvas, you'll notice a check mark and an x in that little diamond. Try dragging and dropping another action onto either the check or x. If the Business Rule evaluates to True, then it runs the actions under the check (or in our case, runs our single line of code). Otherwise it runs the actions under the x. Pretty cool and so damned easy...

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The end of process?!?! Are you nuts???

Recently I have been seeing a large number of links to Ross Mayfield’s blog post called the End Of Process. The article seems to go into a number of different directions but at the heart I think is that organizations put too much faith in rigid processes and that is generally bad. I would partially agree. Any rigid process is a bad thing. Unless you can guarantee

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Re-installing SQL Reporting Services...

At Captaris we recently released Captaris Workflow 5.2. This is a point release adding some new functionality here and there, and one of the cool additions is support out of the box for SQL Reporting Services. I am building a series of automated demos for use on kiosks in our Vianen office at a event coming up soon. So I wanted to be able to show the latest in these demos, and that means showing the latest features too. Being able to report on workflows and key performance indicators from Reporting Services is pretty cool, so getting that going is pretty important. But for some reason RS was giving me no love this morning. I ended up having to reinstall RS. But this is on a demo VPC that has everything, including Sharepoint Portal. I believe this is not a supported scenario from Microsoft. Luckily there is a MSDN article on how to set this up. But even better is a blog posting from Mauro Cardarelli which lists the steps from that MSDN article, PLUS info on installing the Sharepoint webparts for RS, AND where to get the RS rdl files to report on Sharepoint stats. As soon as my VPC finishes rebooting and merging hard disks I look forward to playing with this a bit more.

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