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Work around 4.0 Workflow Editor?

已答复 Work around 4.0 Workflow Editor?

  • 2008年3月13日 18:07
     
     
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    Hello,

    I'm beginning to work with the new workflow editor. Two things are immediately apparent. One is that the new workflow functionality is extremely powerful (major kudos!). Two is that the new workflow editor UI is prohibitively kludgey. To create even a simple workflow, I have to go through a large number of new windows and postbacks, all of which take time to load and quickly become frustrating. And then if I make certain mistakes, for example, if I forget to put a conditional statement around a block of code, there does not seem to be a way to correct it without starting from scratch. I wonder if there is any way to work outside the workflow editor? If I could simply type in code somewhere and import it (even if it was hacky) it would save me a ton of time. I looked into using the Import/Export customizations feature, but it seems that workflows are kept in an encoded format (is there any way to decode/encode into this format?). Really, any suggestions would be great here. The workflows themselves are such a HUGE improvement from 3.0 it would be a shame if I were confined to developing in such an innefficient manner.

    Thank you!

    Josh
    CRM Solution Developer
     

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  • 2008年3月13日 20:18
     
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    Josh,

                I’m very new to the Dynamic CRM environment but have been playing around with the workflow stuff so here is a shot at answering your question.  In the CRMSDK 4.0.2 is a workflowconfigurationtool project (under sdk\tools folder) which when compiled and installed will create a Visual Studio template for CRM workflows.  This takes advantage of the full Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).  The SDK also provides a few sample workflows that are built with VS and imported into CRM.  Pull it down and take a look if you haven’t already.

    CRMSDK – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=82e632a7-faf9-41e0-8ec1-a2662aae9dfb&displaylang=en

    Note: the sdk is now on version 4.0.3 so things may have changed.

    Hope that helps,

    Jason
     
  • 2008年3月13日 23:41
     
     
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    That certainly may be the way I go. From what I'm reading, workflows built using WWF in Visual Studio can't be later edited in CRM. For me, that's not an issue, but my clients would like to have some ability to maintain the workflows themselves without needing a developer on hand and they wouldn't be able to do that if VS was involved. So I kind of want to "have my cake and eat it, too". If that's not possible, this could be a reasonable compromise.

    Thanks Jason,

    Josh
     
  • 2008年3月14日 15:07
     
     
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    I completely understand, we are just starting the process of moving to MS CRM from another system and when the users saw the workflow functionality they wanted access to it.  By no means do I want to insult the intelligence of my users, many of them are really smart, but giving even admin users access to the functionality workflow provides really scares me from a data integrity and compliance perspective.  This will be a hot topic for us as we move forward.  It would be nice if a admin user could design a WF but not Publish it, I need to do some research to see if that security is possible.