About the IDE

The Workflow Studio IDE is where you develop EmpowerID workflows. It comprises four user interface components that work together to provide developers with a visual design environment. Through friendly drag-and-drop operations, depictions of business processes can be translated quickly into workflow logic without the need for extensive code. This can be as simple as dragging predefined activities onto the design surface of the IDE and connecting those activities with flow lines. Code editors allow C# code to be injected into the process when desired to create a complete package.

The below image shows what the Workflow Studio IDE looks like with a Flow Chart workflow opened in the Workflow Designer (also known as the Document Space.

As depicted by the above image, the Workflow Studio IDE is comprised of four components—the Toolbar, the Solution Explorer, the Document Space, and the Toolbox—each of which combine to create a rich, interactive environment for workflow development.

Workflow Studio Toolbar

The Workflow Studio toolbar provides immediate access to a variety of tools and application-specific development commands. The commands are dynamic in that the number of commands at any given time is determined by the number and types of designers and editors opened in the Workflow Studio IDE.

Toolbar Commands

Solution Explorer

The Solution Explorer tab provides access to the workflow applications and other objects that exist in source control. It is comprised of three sub-tabs for managing these applications: the Workspace tab, which gives you access to all the objects you develop in Workflow Studio; the Search tab, which allows you to search for objects by name and type; and the SharePoint tab, which allows you to work with your SharePoint objects. Of the three, the Workspace Tab provides the greatest functionality for working with and managing the objects developed in Workflow Studio.

In Workflow Studio, the workflow applications and other objects that you develop are classified as solution items and placed in folders you create on your local development machine. These folders are simply containers for holding and organizing the items you are developing and are represented as nodes in the Source Control tree. Each time you create a new workflow, activity, user interface element, or other object, Workflow Studio prompts you for the folder in which the object should be placed and then places that within a Source Control folder underneath the selected folder.

Source Control folders exist for each item type that can be created in Workflow Studio and encompass the following:

Additionally, the Workspace tab of Solution Explorer gives you ready access to the commands associated with folder and folder items. These commands are accessible from a context menu that appears when right-clicking an object in the Workspace Source Control tree.

Document Space

The Document Space is reserved for Workflow Studio designers and editors. Most of the work you do in Workflow Studio is accomplished through one or more designers and editors, which are commonly referred to as development tools. In Workflow Studio, designers provide for rapid visual application development, enabling you to organize and present application content at design time. Editors provide intellisense-enabled C# and XML language support for editing code and appear in the Document Space as a tab when that feature is relevant to the object you open in the Document Space. For example, the C# Editor appears for workflows, activities, lookup controls, and forms are open in the Document Space, but does not appear for reports, menus, and pages. In those cases, the editor that appears is the XML Markup Editor.

As a workflow developer, the designers most relevant to you include the following:

• Workflow Designer — The Workflow Designer opens whenever a new workflow application is created or an existing workflow application is being edited. The Workflow Designer allows you to visually design workflow applications and gives you access to all the commands and editors necessary to build a complete workflow application.
  

  

  
  When you open a workflow, Workflow Studio gives you access to the following workflow-related tabs:

  • Workflow Designer Tab — This is where you draw the workflow, adding shapes and connecting them to one another with lines and Business Rules (line rules) to dictate the process flow that should occur in that workflow.

  • Properties Tab — This provides a tree view of the workflow's properties. Clicking a property allows you to view the details of that property. You can add new properties to a workflow by right-clicking the base node in the tree and selecting Add New Property from the context menu.

  • Bindings Tab — This tab displays duplicate tree views of the workflow's properties, as well as the properties of each shape added to the workflow. From this tab you can bind workflow and shape or activity properties to one another using simple-drag-and-drop operations by which you drag an object's property from one tree onto the property of an object in the other tree. Binding properties in this way allows you to visually maintain the consistency of data throughout the execution of the workflow process.

  • External Rules Tab — This tab is similar to the Bindings tab in that it displays two tree views for use in binding properties used in your workflow application. In this case, however, the trees are not duplicates of one another — one tree displays the properties of the workflow and any shapes or activities belonging to that workflow while the other tree displays the Smart Object properties of any External Business Rule Application that has been added the workflow. This allows you to bind workflow properties to the Smart Object properties of the External Business Rule Application.

  • Source Code — This tab allows you to view source code of the workflow application.

• Activity Designer — In Workflow Studio, an activity represents the logic for a step within the workflow. The Activity Designer opens whenever a new activity is created or an existing activity is being edited. The Activity Designer allows you to visually design workflow activities and gives you access to all the commands and editors necessary to build a complete workflow activity that can then be associated with a workflow. Opening an activity gives you access to virtually the same tabs available to you when designing a workflow in the Workflow Designer.
  

  

• Form Designer — The Form Designer opens whenever a new form is created or an existing form is being edited. The Form Designer allows you to visually design forms and gives you access to all the commands and editors needed to build a complete form that can be associated with workflows. The Form Designer provides a drag-and-drop canvas that allows you to easily and quickly create a form by dropping user interface components and controls onto the designer. No coding is necessary, meaning that you can create forms quickly to capture any type of data—from primitive types, such as a string—to more complex types based on registered RBAC components. In addition, you can create your own components and controls and register them for use. Forms must be published before they can be used in a workflow.
  

  

  
  When you publish a form in Workflow Studio, a special activity, known as a "Form activity" is generated and published to the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse. In this activity, each field added to the form is generated as a dependency property. Then, when using the form within a workflow, you can use the drag-and-drop property binding capabilities of Workflow Studio to send data to and from the form to any other part of the workflow.
  

• Lookup Designer — The Lookup Designer opens whenever a new Lookup control is created or an existing Lookup control is being edited. Lookup controls are used in workflows to provide workflow users with searchable grids for looking up and selecting objects contained in the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse for use at various points in a given workflow process. Examples include selecting a group to join or assigning a manager for a new hire. The type of objects returned by the Lookup is based on the method call selected when designing the Lookup. Each method call initiates a specific stored procedure against the EmpoweID Identity Warehouse for a specific resource type. For example, in the below image, the Lookup calls the GetAllSearch(string columnsToSearch, string textToSearch) method against the ManagementRoleView. This executes the dbo.custom_ManagementRoleView_GetAllSearch stored procedure.
  

  ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[Custom_ManagementRoleView_GetAllSearch]
  (
  
      @ColumnsToSearch NVARCHAR(MAX) = null,
      @TextToSearch NVARCHAR(MAX) = null,
      @ResourceTags NVARCHAR(MAX) = NULL,
      @StartRow INT=0,
      @TotalRows INT=1000
  )
  AS
      SET NOCOUNT ON;
      
      DECLARE @Statement NVARCHAR(MAX) = ''
      
      EXEC [GenericSearchForResources]
          @Statement = @Statement,
          @ComponentName = 'ManagementRole',
          @ObjectName = 'ManagementRoleView',
          @ColumnsToSearch = @ColumnsToSearch,
          @TextToSearch = @TextToSearch,
          @OrderByClause = '[Name]',
          @ResourceTags = @ResourceTags,
          @ResourceTypeIDForTags = 40,
          @StartRow = @StartRow,
          @TotalRows = @TotalRows

  
  The fields returned by the procedure are determined by the columns added to the designer. In the above image, procedure returns the ManagementRoleID, DisplayName, Name, the Parent Management Role Definition, Extension Attribute 1, and Extension Attribute 2.

Toolbox

The Workflow Studio Toolbox is situated to the right of the IDE and provides access to a number of features related to workflow development and project management. The Toolbox is comprised of four tabs: the Activities Toolbox tab; the Solution tab; the Properties tab; and the Workflows tab. Each tab has its own unique function, and depending on the type of object open in the Document Space, some tabs will have more relevance to your project than others. The purpose of each is discussed in more detail below.

The Activities Toolbox

The Activities tab displays icons for all activities in your environment that have been published to the Workflow Server(s). Once an activity is published, it becomes available as a toolbox item that can be dragged from the toolbox and dropped onto the design surface of any workflow open in the Document Space. You can also drop activities onto the design surface of a select number of activities.

The Activity Toolbox provides a Search field and a Category drop-down, both of which can be used to narrow the amount of activities appearing in the toolbox. When using the Search field, the available activities are narrowed by the string value entered into the field. To search for an activity, you simply enter the name of the activity or text that can be found in the activity's description. This search is performed across all activities regardless of the category selected. If you wish to broaden the search to a category of activity, you can use the Category drop-down list to locate activities classified by category.

The following image shows the Activity Toolbox with the User Interface category selected from the Category drop-down list. This narrows the activities that are displayed in the toolbox to those with their ToolboxPath property set to User Interface.

The Solution Tab

The Solution Tab provides access to the Code Tree, which provides a logically organized tree view of the files associated with the object currently open in the Document Space and provides placeholders for adding new files, such as custom methods and classes. Expanding a node in the Code Tree allows you to view the files in your project related to that node and gives you access to the commands relevant to it, allowing you to add new assembly references, namespaces, support classes, and embedded resources to the project.

Right-clicking on a node in the Code Tree allows you to access commands relevant to the files represented by that node, as well as the type of object open in the Document Space. The following table show the commands available from the Code Tree for workflow applications.

The Properties Tab

The Properties Tab provides immediate access to the browsable properties of the currently selected object or document in the Document Workspace. Changes made to property values shown in the property grid are committed immediately to the object.

The following image shows property grid displaying browsable properties for the SelectTargetGroups activity.

Whether a property is displayed in the property grid can be controlled with the Browsable attribute. When you create dependency properties for activities you can select or deselect the Show in property grid checkbox, depending on whether you want to display the property in the property grid. Note that public properties without the Browsable attribute are displayed in the property grid by default.