I just saw that the Australia Sharepoint Conference is being organised by fellow Sydney Sharepointers Kathy Hughes, Debbie Ireland, Brendan Law, James Milne and Mark Orange for Sydney in June. Wooah! What good news.
Follow it step for step. However there are a couple of prerequisites you MUST install which are listed in the above document:
All the ones listed in Step 2, Number 7 of the MSDN document above PLUS WCF Hotfix
there a few things you should know that i never found on other blogs:
1) Do the install within your company network, otherwise you’ll get errors in the configuration which will fail on Step 2 with “Exception: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: User cannot be found.” You have online access to the domain controller .
2)The following error: Failed to create the configuration database.
An exception of type System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException was thrown. Additional exception information: The data is invalid.
Can be solved by:
Give Full control to NETWORK SERVICE on the folder c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14
3) The following error: Failed to create sample data. Exception of type Microsoft.Office.Server.userProfiles.userProfileException was thrown. The request channel timed out while waiting for a reply… Increase the SendTimeout value on the binding.
Can be solved by:
Install WCF FIX: A hotfix that provides a method to support the token authentication without transport security or message encryption in WCF is available for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2) . Please note the 2008 fix also applies to Vista, while the 2008 R2 fix also applies to Windows 7.
Ive been itching to write this blog post for a while. See ive been holed up a major car company for a little while now who had a basic requirement. They have MOSS 2007 and were wanting a basic Infopath form and multi-step approval workflow behind it, which just did the basics like sent emails and reminders such as “please approve/reject this form” or “please review this form”. In 95% of Sharepoint Workflow articles (the State machine workflows) ive found that Sharepoint Experts create multiple tasks, with multiple correlation tokens etc etc and it all seemed just a little too confusing and long winded. Now im sure its best practice to create workflows in this manner, but is it easiest? Better yet, is it DYNAMIC? How do i redeploy this workflow for another client and update it without any code changes?
Far too often ive spent time sitting at clients creating each one a custom workflow for their needs, then deploying and moving on, only to find a similar requirement next week at another client. I can write Visual Studio State Machine and Sequential Workflows all day, but surely there is a way to reuse what ive done, better yet, deploy one workflow, and tweak it outside of Visual Studio (without code manipulation) Was there essentially a way for a Business User to update their own workflows?
Well immediately Products such as Blackpoint, Agilepoint or Nintex came running through my mind. They all give the user the ability to create their own workflows, just a little training on those, and id never have to write another workflow. However, most of my clients cannot afford these wonderful products. So they were a no go. Still i was convinced there was a way to create the dynamic workflow!
Well heres my answer:
Essentially every workflow is state based really, it moves from state to state, whether it be sequential or not. A simple example would be a travel request:
State 1: User fills in form -> State 2: send to manager -> State 3: Manager reviews -> State 4: Form approved/rejected.
Within a state machine workflow, the workflow may respond to an event such as OnWorkflowItemChanged and move from state to state depending. The state is normally dictated by the a field in the form, in my example above is the status of the request:
1. Pending
2. Approved
3. Rejected
From this i worked out that i need my form to manage the state of the whole process and my workflow to respond to these changes. Based on what state the form was manaipulated to when a user changed values within the form, execute the relevant workflow step which is associated with that form state. So how might this work in a diagram?
Based on the above diagram i have created 2 videos which run you through both the Form and the workflow itself, explaining how i enabled the form to save the latest state within the form, and how my workflow reacts to these changes:
Form Video
Workflow Video
If you do have any questions, please post comments below, i will try to help out.
Im loving Mark’s work here. He has made it easy to export your solution into a WSP. I used it for my infopath form which worked like a treat. coupled with the Solution Installer, its perfect!
My latest project below… I included a new jQuery Content Slider which i have created as a webpart now which links to my Community Kit for Sharepoint Blogs.
Ill be uploading a video soon for this awesome webpart…
Working with datviews and Sharepoint designer often, i come across the need to show the first few words of a rich text column often, especially the “body” tag say of a blog.
It would be pretty easy using the ddwrt:limit function or the substring() for any other column, but in this case the body tag is actually in html format. The “Limit” function then brings us back ugly part html which is no good to display.
Luckily there is a way. There are essentially two steps here:
1. strip the html
2. return the first ‘x’ words
I used a simple template to strip the html, here it is:
I have literally google the h*ll out of this one. As someone that plays with a lot of dataviews and custom list forms, i come across it this one and im hoping this blog post helps a lot of people!
Essentially the history around it is that it is a Date related problem. So on your Form, if you have Date related fields and you hit the save button, you will get the error which is specified. Apparently the hotfix for kb 949749 works, although some say it doesnt. From readking it may have something to do with the date format and using MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY. Either way, i havent been able to find any quick fixes for it…. until yesterday!
And its really quite simple, although probably not the best solution, it still works.
1. Open up Sharepoint designer, and fire up the problem page.
2. In the design view, find all the date fields. Click the > button as shown below
3. Change the dropdown from List Form Field to Date Picker Field.
