Having a bad back== less blogging

Friday, February 24, 2006 1:54:50 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

I've been dealing with a bad back for about two weeks. Wow - it sucks. Luckily I have the best chiropractor in the world (Dr. Holtzinger - who also used to be Don Box's chiro - so I guess that makes him famous as well ;-) ).

Anyway - some of the stuff I've been working on I haven't gotten permission to blog about yet ;-) - but alot of my time lately has been spent on WF/BizTalk/BAM and what I consider to be one of the more important reasons to use these technologies - visibility (you'll find other people refer to this as transparency - I really don't like that word as much personally).

On the WF forums (http://www.windowsworkflow.net) there have been lots of questions about hosting the WF Designer in a Web Page. This is possible - but only if you give the site the control is downloaded from FullTrust persmissions. I came up with an alternate idea - which is to run the designer on the server - and just output an image of the current state of the designer.

I've coded up a sample you can download if you are interested - hopefully I'll feel good enough soon to actually post a better explanation of how it works. In the asp.net website - AsAControl.aspx hosts the designer as an ActiveX control (remember this is where you need to add or modify a codegroup so this site or page can have FullTrust CAS persmissions).

Default.aspx runs the designer on the server and then ouputs an image. RunAWorkflow.aspx is a sample which runs a workflow and updates the image in real-time as to which Activity has just run (it does this in conjunction with a custom Tracking service). I like this approach better - because it avoids any of the potential CAS issues you might have trying to host the designer in a web page (of course this only works if you are trying to get visibility into the WF execution - not if you are trying to design a workflow - although there are ways that might work with image maps etc - but not likely to be very elegant).

WFTestSample.zip (246.58 KB)

Friday, February 24, 2006 9:09:27 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi Jon. Is there any progress on having WF controlling page flow in ASP.Net? Other than an article on DevX (http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/29992) I don't see any official support from Microsoft.

I am 100% in agreement with you on the visibility you get from using technologies such as BizTalk and WF - but wouldn't it be great if that same visibility could be achieved with web pages?

McGeeky

Monday, March 20, 2006 6:51:12 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Hi Jon, I had downloaded the WFTestSample.zip, and this solution can be compiled and runned normally. But if i start from IIS, this image can't show? why?

Serfert | hncshxfAT NOSPAMhotmail dot com

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 6:46:45 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Jon, your example works great! exactly what I needed, however it only seems to work with sequential workflows .. trying the same method with a state workflow does not work

Have you been able to get this method to generate an image for a state workflow?

Steve Fabian | steve dot fabianAT NOSPAMgmail dot com

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 6:50:43 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

I've made it work with StateMachine as well - what are you seeing?

Jon Flanders | jon dot flandersAT NOSPAMgmail dot com

Thursday, August 10, 2006 7:21:49 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

hey there kit kat!

party poker bonus codes | hdAT NOSPAMthe dot com

Sunday, August 20, 2006 4:34:00 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Now Jon,

how many times have i told you NOT to do GUI's? :p

Hug u soon.

Marvin Smit | msmitAT NOSPAMdevelop dot com

Monday, September 18, 2006 9:59:25 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

Hi Jon,
Excellent blog and sample!
I have downloaded this code and am trying to use it to model our own viewer from within a webpage. However I am not having much success. I need this page to be viewable to browsers outside the corporation, so using an activeX control is not going to work because of the permission issues. So I have tried saving the workflow as an image in the workflow viewer object and returning a stream which is written out to the browser within an iframe. This works ok, however I cannot seem to control things such as the zoom factor and collapsing certain composite activities properly. When I collapse the activities I want, the image that is saved doesnt resize or apply the layout again, so I basically get large chunks of white in my rendered workflow diagram. After I set zoom and collapse certain activities I have tried called workflowView.Refresh() and workflowView.Show() to no avail. Firstly, is what I'm attempting possible? I dont have a lot of experience with these UI drawing objects so I'm really struggling to get my head around these concepts. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Steve | snesbitt76AT NOSPAMhotmail dot com

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