Sharepoint 2010 : Designing Workflows with Visio 2010 (part 2) - Importing the Workflow into SharePoint Designer

Importing the Workflow into SharePoint Designer

From the workflows area in SharePoint Designer, select the Import from Visio icon in the Manage section on the ribbon. Upon import you will have the opportunity to name your workflow and assign it to a list in your site or declare it a site workflow. Figure 4 shows what the workflow looks like after import. As you can see, it got all the steps right; all that is left to do is to fill in the blanks (properties). Now would be a good time to print out the original Visio diagram!

Figure 4. The imported workflow has all the steps but does not provide any of the property values

You will also notice that an imported workflow has a tag over each step that represents the step in the Visio diagram. This makes it much easier when applying the properties.

We continue as if we started in SharePoint Designer by filling in each property value for each step and publishing the workflow to the site. Before we publish, we want to make one change that is specific to imported workflows. From the workflow information page, you will notice the checkbox Show workflow visualization on status page is now enabled (see Figure 5). Checking this will not only render the Visio diagram in the browser, but will also show you the current workflow stage.

Figure 5. An imported workflow allows you display the Visio diagram on the workflow status page (SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise only)

Note

Visio Graphics Services is only available in SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise edition. If the site you are publishing to does not have this license then you cannot take advantage of the graphic representation of the workflow process.

With our workflow published, we are ready to test by creating a new entry in our Expense Requests list. We have set our workflow to fire on all new items, so all we have to do is save the item and check the workflow status page.

The default view of a list that has active workflows will include a Column containing a link to the workflow. When we create our new item, we will see a link to the workflow in a Column called Expense Approval, as you can see in Figure 6. Clicking this link will bring us directly to the workflow status page for this workflow instance.

Figure 6. A list with active workflows will add a Column to the default view for that workflow with a link to the workflow instance for the item

Figure 7 shows our status page. If you remember from our previous workflow, the status page still contains status information, any assigned tasks, and workflow history; with the help of Visio Services, we also have a graphical representation of the workflow at the top of the page.

Figure 7. Visio Services renders the Visio diagram directly in the browser. Visual indicators tell the current step and what happened at previous steps.

Together, Visio 2010 and Visio Graphical Services do wonders in not only bridging the gap between business process designer and workflow developer, but also by bringing the workflows to life by rendering them right on the status page and indicating exactly what is going on with the process.

In this workflow, we used a simple list to gather information from the user that we could use in our workflow. However, it is often the case that complex business processes require much more interaction with the data than a simple list will allow. InfoPath 2010 addresses this need, which we discuss in the next section.