Comments on: Kicking Off A Sharepoint Workflow from a Button, and [Much] More!

By: Marc Anderson

Marc Anderson — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:43:43 +0000

Nancy:

Remember that everything is beyond us until we learn how to do it!

By: Nancy

Nancy — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 12:36:01 +0000

The building/coding is so beyond me that my primary emotion is jealousy that I can’t do this type of work… yet. But I applaud your awesome ingenuity. Brilliant result!

By: Rob Doyle

Rob Doyle — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:53:22 +0000

Greg – I didn’t respond to a couple of your questions from before:

InfoPath was used in this solution because of the business logic required (if you answer question 1, you don’t need to answer questions 3, 4, 5), and the validation logic required. All of this could easily have been done with javascript, but we just didn’t have time. I have a great team of people (Omar, Richie, and Kala) who all specialized in certain areas for this solution (design, InfoPath, workflows) respectively.

So yes, this is built on 2007 – I really like the new 2010 customizable forms, but I am not sure the solution would have worked for us this time. There is a lot of logic in the form that I sort of glossed over. I’d be happy to do a follow-up if there’s more interest.

Heather Solomon’s site is absolutely crammed with great design considerations, in particular the rounded corners:
http://bit.ly/i1dhY

and the datatables plugin is brilliant
http://www.datatables.net

By: Rob Doyle

Rob Doyle — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:35:34 +0000

I’m sure I or one of the other folks could do a big post on that… My goal with this project was to make it as non-SharePointy as possible, so that we could later say “… all this, AND it’s built on SharePoint!” to a cadre of stunned faces, mouths hanging open. (Hey, I can dream, can’t I?)

I may add the InfoPath solution as a potential future post – that is an entirely different can of worms, and fraught with many many ‘gotchas’.

Suffice it to say that the InfoPath form was built with the standard browser-only controls, (not from an MS template) and uses several datasource connections to pull in data, especially on edit and copy functions.

By: Rob Doyle

Rob Doyle — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:31:57 +0000

Hi Greg -

thanks for your comment! I definitely used Jason’s article as our initial starting point, and I’m sure I’ve seen Mark’s as well…

Great question about the GetTemplatesForItem operation – the honest answer is that I just didn’t stumble upon that function until we were already too far into development. I realized we could have used it right at the tail end, but it was just too big a change to incorporate. If you could see the pages we are loading, we actually do 3 separate calls with linked-source DVWPs, cross-referencing several other lists, and then pack them all up into tabs, run the brilliant DataTables jQuery plugin on them, and incorporate our workflow code plus the FancyBox jquery plugin. I started getting worried we were doing way too much on the client side, and this would have added an additional call and thus, an additional page load delay. As it is, they load remarkably fast, though we’ve had to do some tweaking to eke out a little bit better performance.

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:07:54 +0000

Any chances for a follow up articles with an emphasis on the ‘graphic’ side of things – thinking about css for rounded corners, your choice for the overlay solutions (http://www.fancybox.net/home ?) and Integration with InfoPath (I am new to it and got a little bit confused on what you use OOTB vs. custom forms)

I am guessing from the screenshots that you are using 2007 – would you have use a jQuery based overlay solution or try to leverage the ‘new’ overlay forms uyou get with SP2010?

Thanks a lot for sharing your solution!
Greg

PS: Would a video highlighting the UX be possible?

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 18:59:26 +0000

Marc,
Rob,
Very impressive Middle Tier solution!
There are a lot of nifty tricks and ideas in this post and this is a really awesome build up on Jason McKenzie’s post http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/04/21/4-clicks-or-1-using-jquery-to-start-a-sharepoint-workflow/ and Mark Rackley’s initial post http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/01/06/outing-sharepoint-workflows-%e2%80%93-linking-to-workflows-in-list-views-and-item-displays/ [Mark - if you read this, I am pointing to the cross-posted entry at EUSp b/c I just can't find your posts on the http://www.sharepointhillbilly.com/ - would there be a way to improve the search on it - you have some excellent content but it's somewhat hard to find]

The templateID parameter changing everytime a change is made to the WF is definitely a productivity and maintainability killer.

You decided to hardcode the TemplateIDs in the js file. What would have been the pros and cons of using the GetTemplatefromItem operation http://spservices.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=GetTemplatesForItem&referringTitle=Workflow ? Guessing that at some point in time, your workflows are only being updated once in a while and that another webservice call is probably overkill?

Greg