I want to write a workflow application that routes a link to a document. The routing is based upon machines not users because I don't know who will ever be at a given post. For example, I have a form. It is initially filled out in location A. I now want it to go to location B and have them fill out the rest. Finally, it goes to location C where a supervisor will approve it.
None of these locations has a known user. That is I don't know who it will be. I only know that whomever it is is authorized (they are assigned to the workstation and are approved to be there.)
Will Microsoft Windows Workflow do this or do I need to build my own workflow based on SQL Server, IP Addresses, and so forth?
Also, How would the user at a workstation be notified a document had been sent to their machine?
Thanks for any help.
I think if I was approaching this problem workflow would work to do it. It is a state machine you want that has three states:
A Start
B Completing
C Approving
However workflow needs to work in one central place (trust me on this, you only want to have one workflow run time running at once, otherwise the same bit of work can be done multiple times see our questions on MSDN forum). So a central server running the workflow is the answer.
How you present this to the users can be done in multiple ways. Dave suggested using an ASP.NET site to identify the machines that are doing the work, which is probably how I would do it. However you could also write a windows forms client that would do the same thing. This would require using something like SOAP / WCF to facilitate communication between client form applications and the central workflow service. This would have the advantage that you could use a system try icon to alert the user.
You might also want to look at human workflow engines, as they are designed to do things such as this (and more), I'm most familiar with PNMsoft's Sequence
You can design a generic "routing" workflow that will cause data to go to a workstation. The easiest way to do this would be to embed the workflow in an ASP.NET application. Each workstation should visit the application with a workstation ID in the querystring:
http://myapp/default.aspx?wid=01
When the form is filled out at workstation A, the workflow running in the web app can enter it into the "work bin" of the next workstation. Anyone sitting at the computer for which the form is destined will see it appear in their list of forms to review. You can use AJAX to make it slick and auto-updating.
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I am a network admin with very little experience coding or using Powershell. About once a month I have to check for and install Windows updates on about 25 servers. I've played around with Powershell in hopes of handling this task in a more automated fashion but get hung up getting the servers to actually install the updates after checking. I apologize for posting such a noob question, but can anyone let me know if this is possible and if so, show me the ways of your dark arts?
WSUS will require you to install the components and setup the profiles etc. If you have a large number of servers on a single network, that is your best bet for delivering the content.
If you just want to be able to schedule and run the updates on specific remote hosts, there is a ton of stuff already available that will do this and you just need to come up with your implementation of scheduling the updates for what hosts. I did this exact thing for a prior employer for 10k plus servers world wide using a web app for the owners to schedule the updates and then back end workflow to perform the approval requests, installs, logging, etc..
PowerShell Gallery is a good start. Here is a post that walks you through using PSWindowsUpdate.
I'm a novice with AS/400. I have a bit of coding experience and know that there's always an access to the backend if you're clever enough. But developers in my organisation said that it's hard to communicate with the server and make it run things remotely.
So I'm wondering if you anyone's got any ideas how I can schedule a simple task. I login to the "Personal Communication", which is the client app. Then I go to a certain menu, ie I543, enter a parameter "1". And Press "ENTER" to run a report which have a file output.
I know there is that "Macro" function within Personal Communication. But that relies on send keys which does not work on a locked screen, nor do I want to activate it manually, which really defies the point of automation.
I was hoping I can schedule a simple call command somehow to activate some kind of procedure. Just need to know if possible and where to start looking? Thanks.
Last millennium's AS/400 and today's IBM i both have a basic job scheduler built in.
From a command line WRKJOBSCDE.
You need to find out what happens when you select menu I543 option 1. Assuming it's a simple CALL MYRPT or SBMJOB CMD(CALL MYRPT) then adding a scheduled job to run the report is easy.
However, you probably don't have the authority to do so. Nor should your developers necessarily be able to do so. Your system administrator is the right person. In a small shop, that might be the guy doing development. In a large one, it's another person or team.
But your developers should have at least pointed you toward the admin and the job scheduler.
The company I work for uses SharePoint Online. We have a requirement that on most site collections, whenever a user creates a new document library that the document library is configured with the "document" content type being removed, and replaced with some of our own corporate content types.
Previously I've managed this by using a coded sandbox solution installed on relevant site collections which had an event handler that fired on "list added". It's obviously now time to move away from that solution.
I'm really struggling to get to grips with the alternative, conceptually. I'm aiming to replace the old solution with a Remote Event Receiver solution.
The way I think I'd like to achieve this:
1) Create a single remote event receiver hosted in Azure which receives details of a new list being added in a site which it then configures appropriately.
2) Use CSOM to provision the site and as part of that provisioning, hook up the event receiver.
I've spent a lot of time on this, getting nowhere. I initially thought the answer lied in using an App which I could install in the App Catalog and then push out to particular site collections but that doesn't seem to be right.
Is the solution above possible? All examples on the web I've come across of setting up remote event receivers seem to use a SharePoint app which I don't really want to do.
Thanks.
For info I found the answer. You can indeed create a remote event receiver without a SharePoint app/add-in.
The answer was written up here
I thought I needed a SharePoint Provider Hosted App for that part 1
But you should bear in mind that as per Remove event receivers on host web clientContext you will not have the client Context passed through, so
TokenHelper.CreateRemoteEventReceiverClientContext(properties)
...will come through as empty. If you want to interact with SharePoint then you'll need to find another way than this approach, or use a different set of credentials.
In our office, the software we create is sent to our client's office along with an engineer and a laptop. They modify the code at the customer site, based on the customer requests, and deploy the exe.
When the engineer returns to the office, the changed/latest code is not updated to the server, thereby causing us all sorts of problems in the source code on the development boxes and laptops.
I tried to use a version control system like svn, but sometimes the engineer forgets to update the latest code to the svn server. Is there an automatic way that when the laptop connects to the domain, the version control system should automatically check for changes and prompt the user to update the code on the server, or automatically update the code to the server.
I think that the key to this is to require the on-site engineers to use a VCS at the customer site, and to make it a condition of their continued employment that the code at the customer site is in fact reloaded into the VCS on return to the office. You could say that the engineers sent on-site need to be trained in their duties, and they should be held accountable for not doing the complete job - the job isn't finished until the paperwork is done (where 'paperwork' in this context includes updating the source repositories with the customer's custom adaptations of the software).
It seems to me that it might be better to use a DVCS such as Git or Mercurial rather than SVN in this context. However, you should be able to work with SVN if the laptop dispatched to the server has a suitable working copy created for the customization work.
That said, the question is "can we make this easier and more nearly automatic". In part, that might depend on your infrastructure - it also might depend on Windows capabilities about which I'm clueless. There might be a way to get a particular program to run when the laptop connects to a new domain. An alternative (Unix-ish) approach would be to use some regularly scheduled job that runs, say, every hour and looks to see whether it is on the home domain and whether there are changes that should be submitted to the main repository.
We have an internal web system that handles the majority of our companies business. Hundreds of users use it throughout the day, it's very high priority and must always be running. We're looking at moving to ASP.NET MVC 2; at the moment we use web forms. The beauty of using web forms is we can instantaneously release a single web page as opposed to deploying the entire application.
I'm interested to know how others are deploying their applications whilst still making them accessible to the user. Using the deployment tool in Visual Studio would supposedly cause a halt. I'm looking for a method that's super quick.
If you had high priority bug fixes for example, would it be wise to perhaps mix web forms with MVC and instead replace the view with a code-behind web form until you make the next proper release which isn't a web form?
I've also seen other solutions on the same server of having the same web application run side-by-side and either change the root directory in IIS or change the web.config to point to a different folder, but the problem with this is that you have to do an entire build and deploy even if it were for a simple bug fix.
EDIT: To elaborate, how do you deploy the application without causing any disruption to users.
How is everyone else doing it?
I guess you can run the MVC application uncompiled also? and just replace .cs/views and such on the run.
A websetup uninstall/install is very quick, but it kills the application pool.. which might cause problem. Depending on how your site is built.
The smoothest way is to run it on two servers and store the sessions in sql server or shared state. Then you can just bring S1 down and patch it => bring s1 back up again and bring S2 down => patch S2 and then bring it up again. Al thought this might not work if you make any major changes to the session parts of the code.
Have multiple instances of your website running on multiple servers. The best way to do it is to have a production environment, a test environment, and a developement environment. You can create test cases and run the load every time you have a new build, if can get through all the tests, move the version into production ;).
You could have two physical servers each running IIS and hosting a copy of the site. OR you could run two copies of the site under different IIS endpoints on the SAME server.
Either way you cut it you are going to need at least two copies of the site in production.
I call this an A<->B switch method.
Firstly, have each production site on a different IP address. In your company's DNS, add an entry set to one of the IPs and give it a really short TTL. Then you can update site B and also pre-test/warm-up the site by hitting the IP address. When it's ready to go, get your DNS switched to the new site B. Once your TTL has expired you can take down site A and update it.
Using a shared session state will help to minimise the transition of users between sites.