3. Workflow Visualization Using Visio 2013
SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visio 2013
Premium Edition are integrated in a number of ways. SharePoint Designer
2010 and Visio 2010 also provided some integration that enabled Visio
process designs to be imported into SharePoint Designer, and exported
from SharePoint Designer into Visio, but the two applications were
clearly separate. In Visio 2013, the two products are now fully
integrated, so you can have two different views of your custom
workflow. You need both SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visio 2013 Premium
in order to have this capability.
The intent of this section is not to discuss
Visio’s capabilities, but rather to emphasize the value of this new
integration capability when creating custom workflows. For a quick
peek, click the Views button on the Ribbon on the design page of the
workflow you created previously in SharePoint Designer 2013. Note that
there are two options: Text-Based Designer and Visual Designer, as
shown in Figure 12. Click the Visual Designer option, and you should see what is shown in Figure 13.
4. Creating Custom Workflows Using Visual Studio 2012
Visual Studio 2012 is another option
for creating custom workflows, but this option is targeted at
professional developers. This is by far the most flexible option, and
it can be used to create almost any type of workflow organization could
need. Creating a custom workflow in Visual Studio requires an
experienced developer, and typically a developer with quite a bit of
SharePoint development expertise. Obviously, this approach requires
more time and money versus the SharePoint Designer approach.
NOTE Workflows
created with Visual Studio 2012 do not allow the use of .NET code — all
workflows are declarative. This is a big change from creating
SharePoint 2010 custom workflows using Visual Studio 2010, which did
allow .NET code. If you need to utilize .NET code in your custom
workflow, you must create a separate web service to host your code, and
call the web service using the Call Web Service action.
In addition, it is a best practice to package your workflow solutions created with Visual Studio 2012 .wsp
files. They are subsequently deployed and installed to your SharePoint
environment as features by the farm administrator. This process
requires additional planning and time, which must be taken into account
when considering this type of solution, but Visual Studio 2012 is still
the ideal method for creating complex, reusable workflow solutions.
