SharePoint Designer (SPD) can
be a powerful tool for developers and power users offering the ability
to upgrade solutions to Visual Studio and the ability to export work
directly from your site. SharePoint Designer 2013 has become the tool
of choice for power users, especially with the additional workflow and
BCS additions it received in SharePoint 2010. The design community now
has other options for HTML editors, but none of them are as integrated
to SharePoint as SharePoint Design. Even with the addition of
SharePoint Design Manager in the SharePoint user interface, SharePoint
Designer has improvements and will continue to be a useful tool for
power users. One of the key goals for page layout and design by the
SharePoint team was to make it easier to modify the key aspects. This
means there will be alternatives to SharePoint Designer, but tight
integration for designers and power users will still be SharePoint
Designer for their tool of choice. For users building workflows,
SharePoint Designer will be the primary tool of choice. When choosing
the tool you will use for development, keep in mind that every tool has
its purpose, and if you use the right tool for the job, it will make
your SharePoint development easier.
Improved Workflow Experience
SharePoint Designer has become the
one-stop shop for building, packaging, and installing workflows to
SharePoint sites. This section covers the improvements within
SharePoint Designer around workflow.
Two types of workflow platforms are available in
SharePoint Designer: the SharePoint 2010 workflows and now the
SharePoint 2013 workflows. The workflow enhancements in SharePoint
Design 2010 and the SharePoint 2010 workflow framework still work in
SharePoint Designer 2013, but there is now the ability to create
SharePoint 2013 workflows with the same level of support in the
product. This enables users to maintain work already done with previous
versions of SharePoint and the workflows that already are in place
today, while creating new workflows that are maintainable and
upgradeable in the future. Any time you select to create a new
workflow, you will be prompted for the workflow platform type, as shown
in Figure 1.
The new SharePoint 2013 workflow platform type is
built using Windows Azure Workflow services. This requires that the
SharePoint site that you connect SharePoint Designer with must have
Windows Azure Workflow services installed prior to creating SharePoint
2013 workflows. The reason you need to have the new workflow service
installed is because the underlying actions in SharePoint Designer must
be able to communicate to the service for details on how the action
will work. If you use Microsoft Office 365, you have integrated Windows
Azure Workflow without needing to install any additional software, but
you need to install the service locally if you use the On Premise
installation.
New shapes and control of workflow is provided
with the Windows Azure Workflows. These new shapes available in
SharePoint Designer are Stages, Loops, and Steps. These new shapes
enable branching and looping logic that was provided by the new
SharePoint 2013 workflows. No longer is it required to use Visual
Studio Workflow Designer for support of looping. The new shapes can be
added to the designer surface within SharePoint Designer by either
dragging and dropping them or using the workflow Ribbon bar to add them
in the selected location. When using SharePoint Designer to build your
workflows, the required elements of the new shapes are added for you
when they are placed on the design surfaces.
The Visual Designer view in SharePoint Designer
extends the ability of business users and developers to work on
workflows with Visio 2013 and SharePoint Designer. The layout of the
Visual Designer provides the same rich representation as Visio with a
graphical design surface and sets of shapes for use on the designer
surface. To get the built-in functionality of Visual Designer, you must
have Visio 2013 installed on the same machine as SharePoint Designer.
You can see how quickly a workflow can be started by using this
Workflow Visual Designer, as shown in Figure 2.
In addition to using the Visual Designer you can
still switch the view back to the Text Based Designer that many users
are accustomed to using with previous versions of SharePoint Designer.
The changes that are made in the text-based designer are translated
into the visual designer as well as the other way, too. If you need a
high-level view of the stages, you now switch to the Stages view. The
option still exists if you want to export to Visio and allow your
business users to modify the workflow in a tool they commonly use.
Performing the same task multiple times in the
workflow was difficult, especially if you wanted to quickly reuse some
of the conditions or actions that had already been configured. The new
Copy and Paste feature can help when designing large workflows that
have some repeating information. Workflow designers can now use the
same shortcut keys for copy and paste or the Ribbon bar to select a
single action or an entire stage with all the contained actions. There
are few limitations to this new feature such as no ability to use
CTNL+Z to undo the last command. The copy and paste functionality is
not like Excel or Word, and you cannot use control to select multiple
objects or drag and drop items on the workflow. You can use this Copy
and Paste feature in either the SharePoint 2013 Workflow type or the
SharePoint 2010 Workflow type.
To make it easier to pass data around a workflow,
the Dictionary type variable has been introduced into SharePoint 2013
Workflows. A Dictionary type has a collection of Name/Value pairs, and
the value has a type. You can now create complex types that are stored
in memory for use within the workflow. There are a number of actions
that use the Dictionary type such as Build Dictionary, Count Items in a
Dictionary, and Get an Item from a Dictionary, as well as actions such
as Call HTTP Web Service. Some of the new actions create the dictionary
object, whereas others use it to define the action.
New Workflow Actions
With the addition of Windows Azure
Workflow, SharePoint Designer has added a number of new workflow
actions that resolve a lot of the difficulties in the previous release.
Workflows are composed of conditions and actions. Actions
perform the functions you want, and you can customize workflows by
writing custom actions. The new actions are designed for integration
with SharePoint 2010 workflows and implement a similar custom action
that was available on CodePlex for SharePoint 2010 workflows.
A new action that enables designers to call REST
services and OData web services is called the Call Web Service Action.
This action is designed to make an HTTP web service call and return the
data in the JSON format. This action could be used to call any website
that exposes web-based APIs, in addition to frameworks such as ASP.NET
Web API endpoints. The importance of directly calling these services
using the basic authentication supported in the RequestHeader is that
you can now connect to data with dynamic structures. This action is
available when you select the SharePoint 2013 workflows and can be
added to the design surface using the new Shapes or the Actions drop
down.
The Start Workflow Action has been added to allow
SharePoint 2013 workflows to start SharePoint 2010 workflows’ direction
from the workflow. This provides an easy way to use the new workflow
platform, but still use the investments that have been made in built
and tested works using the SharePoint 2010 version. Just like all the
other actions, you can add it directly from the Shapes or workflow
Actions menu. When configured, your existing workflows are ready to use
again without any modifications until you are ready to modify them.
Navigating the User Interface
SharePoint Designer provides a
consistent user interface with the common Ribbon UI to help discover
the tasks you can perform in SPD against your SharePoint sites. The
navigation of SPD uses grouping of logical SharePoint artifacts for
users to quickly navigate to the actions needed. This interface makes
navigation and discovery of your SharePoint site and information
architecture easier. Figure 3 shows SharePoint Designer in action.
SharePoint Designer is tightly integrated to the
SharePoint sites you are editing, and you must be connected to a
SharePoint site to use the features of SharePoint Designer. After you
connect to a site, the details display along with the permissions and
settings. Connecting to a site is required for the information that is
displayed and to allow for the direct changes to be made to the site.
SharePoint Designer does not store the data locally but always makes
the changes directly to the site after the Save and/or Publish buttons
are pressed.
The navigation for SharePoint Designer 2013 has
remained the same as the previous version with the site objects grouped
in the navigation pane, which makes it easy to find what you are
looking for. The site objects are grouped into common actions by the
following categories: Site Information, Lists and Libraries, Workflows,
Site Pages, Site Assets, Content Types, Site Columns, External Content
Types, Data Sources, Master Pages, Site Groups, Subsites, and All
Files. From the Navigation menu you can begin changing the content of
the site as needed. Select the site objects you would like to change,
and the Summary menu shows a list of all the items on that site. For
example, if you select Site Page, you see a list of all the site pages
with actions on the Ribbon to make modifications.
The Ribbon was introduced in SharePoint Designer
2010 and is used to perform actions in SharePoint Designer just like in
Microsoft Office products. The Ribbon user interface makes it easier
for you to work with site objects by showing contextual tabs based on
the selected objects that you click. The Ribbon interface makes it
simple to manage your site with all the options available in a single
interface and grouped together.
Workflow developers new to SharePoint Designer
can find the full and rich capabilities wanted for any development,
testing, and quick changes. New workflows that can be created for a
site are based on the list, reusable, or site workflow. In addition to
the new features added, you still have the capabilities around the
existing actions and conditions. Management of the workflows can be
done directly in SharePoint Designer as well as publishing the new
workflows created.
Having the ability to create, design,
and work with Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2013
allows users to quickly manage their external content types. Using
SharePoint Designer you can view your external content types and make
new ones. The external content types can connect to databases, .NET
types, or web services, and you can have SharePoint Designer
auto-generate the methods needed to perform your create, read, update,
and delete (CRUD) changes, and finder/query operations against the back
ends. Finally, you can create the external lists associated with your
external content type in SharePoint Designer.
