Blog posts tagged with 'workflow'

Many people have asked me how to build custom dialogs in Workflow Studio. Enough people have asked that I have built custom dialogs as native tasks in Workflow Studio and I have also built them in PowerShell (something you could do right now with the tech preview.) Before I post more information on how to do this though I want to better understand why people want to have custom dialogs.

An example that I often hear is that someone wants to modify one of our samples to prompt the user for their username and password in the same dialog instead of using two dialogs. Another example I hear is that people would like a multi-column display tool (like a grid) to display the contents of objects output from other tasks. When people ask me for this I begin to wonder how they plan to use the workflow once they get beyond testing it. When we created those samples we included the user input to ensure that the user is aware of what the workflow is doing and to provide a way for them to input the settings specific to their environment. We expect that most people will deploy workflows with these settings pre-configured in the tasks directly or by using the "Set Variable Value" task and that any output would be to XML files or other tasks.

I wrote a post on IT Process Automation with Workflow Studio that looks at some of the use cases we expect Workflow Studio to be used for. Read through that earlier post for a little deeper look at how I think workflows will be used.  [And if you think I am wrong please leave me a comment or send me an email...]

With that post in mind, I believe that the people requesting richer interaction from a workflow are either looking to do a lot of "On-Demand Automation" or they are looking for Workflow Studio to offer a richer set of debugging tools for desiging and debugging workflows. If you have read this far then take my poll and tell me which you think it is for you?

Why do you want a richer set of Input/Ouput tasks in Workflow Studio?	Choose
To make designing and debugging workflows easier - I would delete them before deploying.
Because I expect to use "On-Demand Automation" type tasks heavily and not schedule workflows to run automatically
I don't need richer user interface options

Building your first workflow with Citrix Workflow Studio is incredibly easy. We include many templates with the Tech Preview that allow you to see how the product works quickly and easily.

First go download the product - http://www.citrix.com/wfsinsider (MyCitrix login required, but it is painless to get one.)

Once you download and install the product you will see the following the first time you launch it:

Just click the box where it says "Create a new workflow based on a Workflow Template" and you will see the following:

Provide a name for your new workflow and select one of the workflow templates that we included with the product. The easiest one to set up and understand for your first time is the one under "Windows Management" called "Start Stopped Services". Select that one from the list and click "OK". You should see the Workflow Studio Designer interface with the template loaded like this:

 You now have built your first workflow. Click "Start" to run the workflow and you should be presented with a list of the services that are currently in a stopped state on your machine. Much like the following:

If you select one or more services and click "OK" Workflow Studio will attempt to start those services.

Note: If the service is disabled Workflow Studio will not be able to start it and will return an error. Take a look at the workflow and see if you can modify it to exclude the services that are in a disabled state.

I would love to see comments on what people think about Workflow Studio and what they would like to use it for in their environment. I plan to post some more advanced workflow samples in coming weeks, so let me know what you would like to see.