Search
Closed
as By Design Help for as By Design

0
Sign in to vote
0
Sign in to vote
Sign in
 to vote
Type: Suggestion
ID: 480674
Opened: 8/4/2009 6:54:31 AM
Access Restriction: Public
0
Workaround(s)
We would like to be able to override the current step of Flowchart, Sequence and other containers.

Ideally we would be able to inherit from Flowchart and override the default Execute behavior, or have a property on Flowchart to set the next FlowNode to execute after the current node finishes. The same goes for Sequence.

Theoretically it could be possible to reimplement Flowchart and Sequence for our application, but that would be a huge amount of work for a very small change.
Details (expand)

Product Version
.NET Framework 4.0 (Beta 1)
Product Language
English

Operating System
Windows XP
Operating System Language
English

Architecture
x86

Priority
(1=blocking, 2=important, 3=nice to have)
2

Severity
(1=major functionality issue, 2=important functionality issue, 3=nice to have)
2

Component Usage
(what aspects of the product are you using and what is the scenario you are wishing to accomplish)
The users of our application need to have the option to manually override the workflow behavior and set the next execution step.
We have documents passing through scanning engines for automatic classification. Sometimes documents are misclassified and need to be manually moved to the correct part of the flow.
Since our workflows have tasks requiring a lot of processing time, it is also important for our developers to move data to parts of the workflow for testing and debugging. Otherwise they would have to wait for the data to get to a specific part of the flow.
Suggestion/Feedback:
(what would you like to see improved/changed in future versions/SPs)
Either unseal Flowchart, Sequence, ... so we can override the Execute method, or provide a public property to set the next execution step.
Proposed Solution
Either unseal Flowchart, Sequence, ... so we can override the Execute method, or provide a public property to set the next execution step.
Benefits
Improved Administration

Other Feedback
 
File Attachments
0 attachments
Sign in to post a comment.
Posted by Microsoft on 8/28/2009 at 12:30 PM
Thank you for using the .NET Framework 4.0 and providing feedback on the WCF and WF products. This bug is currently going to the feature team who will directly investigate the issue you are reporting. We are very eager to receive this feedback and will take care to address your input. Feel free to provide comments on the Connect site if you have concerns on the resolution of this bug.

Thanks,
Amy
Posted by Microsoft on 8/28/2009 at 5:41 PM
Thanks for filing this bug!

The current plan of record is that in Dev10 this types are not going to be inheritable. The approach that we recommend for Dev10 is using composition (activities can be freely composed) and when that is not enough write your own custom activities. The general model that WF has taken is one that favors composition over inheritance.

The story for writing custom activities have been dramatically simplified in .NET 4. There are no special steps involved in writing a custom composite activity (in WF 4 is just an activity like any other else). We are providing the activity authors the same tools that we use for writing the out of the box activities (we are not using any special or internal feature in Sequence or Flowchart).

Additionally, we are providing a rich set of samples on how to write your own custom activities in our SDK to help customers to get started (please check under scenarios\ActivityLibrary).

If you have any further question or comment, please feel free to mail me directly to lwelicki@microsoft.com

Thanks,
Leon Welicki
Program Manager, Connected Framework Team
© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft Connect Terms of Use | Trademarks | Privacy Statement