Monthly Archives: April 2012

Automating deployment of reusable workflows in Nintex Workflow 2010

One of the options for creating workflows in Nintex Workflow 2010 (NW2010 for short) is to associate workflows  with Content Types.This category of workflows is known as Reusable workflows.

As stated in Nintex Workflow 2010 User Manual

A resusable workflow template allows the workflow to be used on a content type, list or library through the
default SharePoint Workflow settings option.
Reusable workflow templates can be created for use within a single site or an entire site collection

In our case we are only interested in reusable workflows for content types.

Let’s disscuss the scenario when we need to automate the deployment of reusable workflow. It may take place for example, when there are several environments. The approach discussed here allows to deploy workflows during feature activation.

NW2010 API contains publishing infrastucture (Nintex.Workflow.Publishing namespace) that allow to programatically publish workflow templates.
Class Publish contains  method

that allows to associate workflow using ContentTypeId parameter.

The method below demonstrate how to deploy reusable workflow file by passing it file name, contenttype name and workflow name(NWFMappingEntry parameter)  using Nintex API PublishAWorkflow method.

Project that demonstrates how to deploy Nintex reusable workflows may be found here

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Validate SharePoint People Editor in SharePoint 2010

Overview

Validation of SharePoint PeopleEditor WebControl on the client-side is often required. On server side validation is supported, see AllowEmpty and  ValidatorEnabled properties for details, but the lack of client side validation makes it inconvenient for scenarios where client side validation is mandatory. So let’s discuss some techniques how it could be achieved.

Server-Side Validation

In order to enable/disable validation for Entity Editor based controls (like People Editor) the following properties should be specified in combination:

For example, the  code below demonstrates how to disable empty values:

Client-Side Validation

Let’s start with the simple method that allows to check if PeopleEditor control is not empty.

The code below demonstrates  how to validate if SharePoint PeopleEditor control value is not empty

It can be used in the following scenarios:

Since jQuery is commonly used  in SharePoint front-end development, it validation  capabilities could be used  for  PeopleEditor,  for example  jQuery Validation plugin. The code below demonstrates how validation rule that allow us to verify if PeopleEditor value is not empty, may look like.

References