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Rendering Custom Activities in the FIM Portal

  • Article

The Workflow Designer in the FIM Portal allows users to design workflows that contain instances of custom activities (activities that are not part of the FIM product). In order for the custom activity to be rendered in the Workflow Designer, the web control must implement the IActivitySettingsPart interface. How to: Create a Custom Logging Activity gives an example of creating a UI using that interface. Developing Custom Activities and Workflows gives general guidelines for developing custom activities and workflows. This document describes guidelines for creating a UI for a custom activity so that the activity is correctly rendered on the design surface of the Workflow Designer.

Custom Activity UI Tenets:

These guidelines are meant to make sure that the overall flow and spirit of the designer is respected by a custom built activity.

Any developer of a custom activity that wants it to be rendered on the Workflow Designer surface must abide by these tenets of activity design:

  • Do not pop up any windows.

  • Use an ASP.NET web control to render your activity.

  • Avoid using any type of scroll bar within your UI.

  • The activity should be designed within a single screen layout (no wizards within an activity).

  • The activity should have the capability to adapt its look and feel to inherit from SharePoint themes on the site where the FIM Portal is being hosted.

Remarks

Tip

If you are creating custom authorization workflows, the correct way to deny the request is to throw an exception containing an error message if authorization fails. The exception message will show up in the request status details displayed in the FIM Portal.

Note

Custom activities must be signed in order to for them to load correctly and be displayed in the Workflow Designer in the FIM Portal. See How to: Sign an Assembly with a Strong Name.

See Also

Concepts

How to: Create a Custom Logging Activity
Developing Custom Activities and Workflows