User initiated work flows are the back bone of Vision’s extensibility. You are able to react on every insert, update or delete for any info center record and create your own validations, field calculations or messages for the event. You can even call your own code functions, web services and stored procedures. But there’s on big limitation you have to remind yourself…
You Are Still In Validation Mode
Whenever the workflow is triggered you are still in the record’s Validation Mode. You are actually able to cancel the record to be stored with workflow actions.
This also means that the changes themselves are not yet stored to the database! So should your stored procedure or web service try to re-select the data or add referential data (like entries to info center tables) your stored procedure might error out or not work as expected.
There are some ways of getting around this, depending on your needs:
Pass Along All Data As Parameters
Within the workflow you still have access to all updated or new and all old values. So in certain scenarios it is possible to push this information out to the stored procedures via parameters. This might not only be a bit tedious but it might prove impossible if you need data from data connected to the main info center record.
Build A Processing Table
Another approach that will always work is to hand off processing to a secondary call:
What you do is you create a User Defined Table with columns such as
– info center key
– process status
– any other info that you need
Then in the workflow event of the info center record you add an entry to this UDIC with a status of ,unprocessed’.
Once you capture all changes in this table you can create a secondary Scheduled Workflow, web service, windows task or similar to then process all unprocessed records in that call. This will ensure that all changed data had been committed to the database at this point and you’re stored procedure can pick up that data and do all that you need it to do.
I hope this will help you with your Deltek Vision Customisation scenarios
