Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010 Expert Cookbook: Develop, debug, and deploy business solutions for SharePoint applications using Visual Studio 2010 with this book and ebook.

According to Workflow Management Coalition (http://www.WFMC.org) a standards organization that solely concentrates on processes, defines a workflow as follows:

In simple terms, it means a workflow is a system that manages the execution of a business process. Organizations implement workflows for many different reasons such as:

Whatever may be the reason for workflow implementation; it is implemented by breaking up the business processes into small activities and executed in a logical order.

An activity in a workflow is the smallest piece or item that you execute. Take for instance a business process that manages employee time and expense reporting (T&E). In here, when employee submits the T&E, a notification...

In this recipe, we will learn how to create a sequential workflow. For this recipe, we will model a credit approval process. When a user adds an item to a list, we will let the workflow instantiate automatically on the inserted item and flow through the process of checking the user's requested credit line and approving it based on user's employment and credit history.

The previous recipe is a good example of a sequential workflow where there is no human interaction. If it were really dealing with a credit approval process on a credit application, this could have gone through the external applications to verify the credit history and employment history and made the decision. So to take advantage of this automation, let us create our own credit application approval system. In this recipe, we will create a site workflow to enact our credit application approval process. Since site workflows are not associated with any lists, there is no form that we can get out of the box for a user to input data and start the workflow. For this purpose, we will also incorporate an initiation form that upon submission will start the workflow.

To keep the workflow simple, the workflow will base its decision on the credit amount requested. If the credit amount is less than $1000.00 it will be automatically approved or if it is...

In this recipe, we will recreate the previous recipe to use InfoPath forms for initiation form.

So far we created workflows that run automatically without stopping for user input in the middle of the process. Initiation or association data come before the workflow is started. There are many situations where in the middle of the workflow process you may want input from a user to proceed further. To do this, we will create tasks in SharePoint.

In this recipe, we will create an Employee Suggestion Program (ESP) workflow, where employees of a company can provide suggestions on the betterment of the business processes that are in place in the company. For this, when an employee suggests a process improvement, a task is assigned to the department director to take a look at and decide on the value of the suggestion.

In the previous recipe, when the department director completes the task, we cannot determine whether he wants the suggestion implemented or rejected. We may have to find out using the comments field as there is no other field that provides a way for him to convey that information. If the workflow has to take action based on this input, the default form provided will not fit the situation. We may have to create a custom form and present it to the user to perform their tasks. You can use either the ASPX page or InfoPath form to create the custom task form. In this recipe, we will create a custom InfoPath task form.