Well 2007 closed down with a rush, I’m not even certain where December went it passed so quickly.
On the project front, I had to rush to complete all the changes required by the project manager, and just at the end, scope creep reared it’s head again. In the end, I release only the first 3 workflows and I’m currently working on the last 2 which are due to release tommorrow.
I’m finding it a little hard to concentrate however as the the hard weather that hit us yesterday is adding to the white stuff across the mountains of Europe. I’m off on the 26th to La Plagne for a week on my board, New boots and Flow bindings from Christmas are going to get their first turns!!! My active desktop is currently showing a near white out in the upper villages, so you know those tree lined runs are going to be near perfect by the time we get out there.
but that’s an aside, I still have some coding to finish and a SHEDload of documentation to get done.. (Thank the lord for /// comments!)
So what recent problems have I hit, Well the main problem has been how do you update detail on an Infopath form for a task in progress. Why is this a problem? Well, picture this scenario:-
The workflow starts and consists of 2 parallel tasks, Team A happily gets on with it, but notices a problem with the selected resources and makes a change to these. Now Team B’s task has already been created, so how do we interact with the new information?
In theory it should be easy, we can update the task information during the onTaskChanged event.. the only problem here is that this fires AFTER the form has been updated and changed.. it’s a ….ED event.
The only way I’ve found around this is to write a web service that is called by the form and looks at all the configured resources and updates itself before displaying to the user. I haven’t used any custom code in the Infopath form, it’s all been done with dataconnections and some rules.
The main issue I had though was the fact that Infopath is reading and displaying the users as a semi-solon seperated list in a text field, and SharePoint stores the objects as part of field containing a collection of SPFieldUserValues, So this required the writing of some translators.
I’ll be putting the code and a better description in my next post, but as a bit of food for thought, bear this in mind.. Users in SharePoint are stored as SPUser items, If you add these users to a singl user field in a list, they are added as an SPFieldUserValue. If you add them to a multi entry user field, then they are added as an SPFieldUserValuecCollection.
Reg.
