Workflow Activities for Windows SharePoint Services Overview
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The Visual Studio 2005 Designer for Windows Workflow Foundation includes predefined activities you can use to create Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 workflows. In addition, the Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions namespace, included with Windows SharePoint Services, includes numerous workflow activities you can use in your Windows SharePoint Services workflows. These activities are optimized to simplify and streamline developing workflows for use in Windows SharePoint Services. This includes workflow activities designed for use in the Visual Studio 2005 Designer for Windows Workflow Foundation, as well as workflow activities designed for use in a rules-based, code-free workflow editor such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.
Windows Workflow Foundation Activities Supported in SharePoint Workflows
Because not all the activities available in the Visual Studio 2005 Designer for Windows Workflow Foundation are relevant in the context of SharePoint sites, Windows SharePoint Services supports a subset of the available activities. These include the following:
Code Use to add Microsoft Visual Basic or Microsoft Visual C# code to your workflow.
ConditionedActivityGroup Use to perform a set of activities conditionally, based on criteria specific to each activity, until a condition is met for the ConditionedActivityGroup activity as a whole.
Sequence Use to execute an ordered set of child activities.
Replicator Use to create multiple instances of a single child activity.
For more information about these activities, visit the Windows Workflow Foundation Developer Center.
Activities for Use with the Visual Studio 2005 Designer for Windows Workflow Foundation
The following workflow activities have been specifically designed to be used in workflows created using the Visual Studio 2005 Designer for Windows Workflow Foundation. These activities can help you create workflows in these main areas:
Creating, updating, completing, and deleting SharePoint tasks
Detecting events on the list item on which the workflow instance is running
Enabling workflow modifications within specific scopes, to allow users to modify workflows that are in progress
SharePointSequentialWorkflowActivity
Declarative, No-Code Workflow Activities
The following workflow activities are specifically designed for use in a declarative, code-free workflow, for example, in a workflow you might create by using a rules-based, code-free workflow editor such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. As a result, the workflow activity might not include certain functionality, such as registering for workflow events, that might be used in compiled workflow assemblies that are created by using the Visual Studio 2005 Designer for Windows Workflow Foundation.
The Visual Studio 2005 Designer for Windows Workflow Foundation does not support the following workflow activities:
See Also
Concepts
How Windows SharePoint Services Processes Workflow Activities
Correlation Tokens in Workflows
Workflow Initiation in Windows SharePoint Services