Previously, I posted a guide to creating and deploying a very simple custom Association form for a MOSS workflow. This time, I will walk through the steps to create a custom Initiation form, and also a bit of detail on consuming the data from the Initiation form from your workflow code. To reiterate what I said in the Association form walkthrough, what I am creating here is not a form you would use in a real workflow – the intent is to demonstrate the process with as much noise and detail stripped away as possible.

As I describe in my other post, the Association form is displayed when you connect your Workflow Template to a document/form library, list, or content type (the action known as creating an association). The Initiation form is displayed when the user actual starts or instantiates the workflow on an item in a list or document library. The intent is to collect startup information for the workflow. The information collected by the Instantiation form may be the same as on the Association form (allowing the user to override the defaults) or it may be completely different information. Have a look at  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms481192.aspx if you would like to see Microsoft’s definitions.

Before we start, have a look at my previous post describing my base environment for creating these examples.

I used a new web application, and a new site collection created using the Team Site template. I named my site InitiationFormDemo;

On this new site, create a Form Library (which I named Workflow Form Library);

Also create a new Task List. I called mine Workflow Tasks. At this point, your site home page should look something like the picture below.

Launch Visual Studio 2008. Create a new project. Expand the C# project tree, select Workflow, and select the SharePoint 2007 Sequential Workflow. Name the project “MyWorkflow”. The create project dialog should look like the picture below.

Click finish. Normally, we would change the workflow name in the project, add some activities, some code, etc., but this is not necessary for this example. The project should look something like this.

Now we will create the InfoPath Initiation Form. Launch InfoPath and select Design a Form Template. Select the settings as shown below (Form Template, Blank, Enable browser-compatible features only).

8 ) Design the Custom Initiation Form – Create Data Source for Submission

In the InfoPath Designer, select Tools | Data Connections… and click the Add button. Create the new data connection as shown in the following pictures.

Click Finish and Close to get back to the main InfoPath window.

In the Task Pane, under Design Tasks, click on Data Source. Right click on myFields, and select Add to add a new field to the schema. Create a new field as shown below, and click Ok.

Drag and drop the My Setting field onto the design surface, to create label and text box for it. Also add a Button control, and change its label to “Submit”. Your form should look something like the picture below.

Double click on your Submit button to display the Button Properties dialog. Click on the Rules… button, and click Add and then Add Action. Select options as shown below, and click Ok.

Click Add Action again, and set the options as shown below, and click Ok.

You should now have two actions, as shown below.

Finally, we must set the form trust to Domain. Select Tools | Form Options…, and select Security and Trust. Unselect the checkbox Automatically determine security level (recommended), and click the Domain radio button, as shown below, and click Ok.

Save the form to disk (File | Save). You can save it anywhere you want, as long as it is not your Visual Studio project folder. I just save mine to a Forms folder in My Documents. Name the form MyInitiationForm.xsn for this example (in practice you can name it whatever makes sense).

Now we want to publish the form. This did not entirely make sense to me, but when you select File | Publish…, on the first page of the publish dialog we will select To a Network Location even though we will actually publish it to our Visual Studio workflow project folder.

Click Next, and then browse to the location where you will publish the form. In this case, we want to publish to your workflow project folder, as shown.

Type a name for your form (I used MyInitiationForm.xsn), click Ok, and Next. On the next form, clear the text box and click Next (this is important, the form will not work if you do not clear that text box!)

When you click Next, a warning will pop up, as shown below. Click Ok to continue.

Click Publish and Close, and then exit InfoPath.

In Windows Explorer, navigate to your workflow project folder, right click on the InfoPath form you just published there, and select Design. When the form opens in design mode, select File | Properties… to display the properties dialog shown below.

Select the ID as shown, and copy it to the clipboard. Click Ok and exit InfoPath.

Go back to Visual Studio 2008, and open you workflow project if it is not still open. Open the workflow.xml file. The default file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<!-- Customize the text in square brackets.
     Remove brackets when filling in, e.g.
     Name="[NAME]" ==> Name="MyWorkflow"
 -->

<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
   <Workflow Name="MyWorkflow"
             Description="My SharePoint Workflow"
             Id="0d94af3a-45e7-4035-b351-9a10fc41018d"
             CodeBesideClass="MyWorkflow.Workflow1"
             CodeBesideAssembly="MyWorkflow, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=96c40524715e44e9">

      <Categories/>
      <MetaData>
         <!-- Tags to specify InfoPath forms for the workflow; delete tags for forms that you do not have -->
         <!--<Association_FormURN>[URN FOR ASSOCIATION FORM]</Association_FormURN>
         <Instantiation_FormURN>[URN FOR INSTANTIATION FORM]</Instantiation_FormURN>
         <Task0_FormURN>[URN FOR TASK (type 0) FORM]</Task0_FormURN>
         <Task1_FormURN>[URN FOR TASK (type 1) FORM]</Task1_FormURN>-->
         <!-- Modification forms: create a unique guid for each modification form -->
         <!--
         <Modification_[UNIQUE GUID]_FormURN>[URN FOR MODIFICATION FORM]</Modification_[UNIQUE GUID]_FormURN>
         <Modification_[UNIQUE GUID]_Name>[NAME OF MODIFICATION TO BE DISPLAYED AS A LINK ON WORKFLOW STATUS PAGE</Modification_[UNIQUE GUID]_Name>
         -->
         <StatusPageUrl>_layouts/WrkStat.aspx</StatusPageUrl>
      </MetaData>
   </Workflow>
</Elements>

Paste the ID from your InfoPath form properties into the <Instantiation_FormURN> element, and uncomment the element (be careful that the other commented out elements stay that way – or delete the ones you are not using as I did):

<Instantiation_FormURN>urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:infopath:MyInitiationForm:-myXSD-2009-04-06T02-58-49</Instantiation_FormURN>

Of course, your actual URN will be different than mine.

Add the following new attribute to the <Workflow> element:

InstantiationUrl="_layouts/IniWrkflIP.aspx">

Your workflow.xml file should now look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!-- Customize the text in square brackets.
     Remove brackets when filling in, e.g.
     Name="[NAME]" ==> Name="MyWorkflow"
-->
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
   <Workflow Name="MyWorkflow"
             Description="My SharePoint Workflow"
             Id="0d94af3a-45e7-4035-b351-9a10fc41018d"
             CodeBesideClass="MyWorkflow.Workflow1"
             CodeBesideAssembly="MyWorkflow, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=96c40524715e44e9"
             InstantiationUrl="_layouts/IniWrkflIP.aspx">
      <Categories/>
      <MetaData>
         <!-- Tags to specify InfoPath forms for the workflow; delete tags for forms that you do not have -->
         <Instantiation_FormURN>urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:infopath:MyInitiationForm:-myXSD-2009-04-06T02-58-49</Instantiation_FormURN>
         <StatusPageUrl>_layouts/WrkStat.aspx</StatusPageUrl>
      </MetaData>
   </Workflow>
</Elements>

Save the file and close it.

Next, open the feature.xml file. It will look something like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Feature Id="15fdd97f-db32-44c1-96cc-cab49acecd36"
         Title="MyWorkflow feature"
         Description="My SharePoint Workflow Feature"
         Version="12.0.0.0"
         Scope="Site"
         ReceiverAssembly="Microsoft.Office.Workflow.Feature, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"
         ReceiverClass="Microsoft.Office.Workflow.Feature.WorkflowFeatureReceiver"
         xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
   <ElementManifests>
      <ElementManifest Location="workflow.xml" />
   </ElementManifests>
   <Properties>
      <Property Key="GloballyAvailable" Value="true" />
      <!-- Value for RegisterForms key indicates the path to the forms relative to feature file location -->
      <!-- if you don't have forms, use *.xsn -->
      <Property Key="RegisterForms" Value="*.xsn" />
   </Properties>
</Feature>

Find the <ElementManifests> tag, and under that, add a new <ElementFile> element inside it as shown:

<ElementManifests>
   <ElementManifest Location="workflow.xml" />
   <ElementFile Location="MyInitiationForm.xsn"/>
</ElementManifests>

Save the file and close it.

Back in IE, navigate to your form library. Since I’ve not created a custom association form in this example, you can create the association using the default form (if you have set up your project to auto-associate, you will not need to do this manually).

Since we want to initiate a workflow, first we need to add a document to the library. I just clicked upload and selected a random file from my desktop. Hover over the file you uploaded and left-click to bring up the context menu. Select Workflow from the menu. Then click on MyWorkflow to start the workflow. This should bring up your custom instantiation form as shown below.

Enter some text, and click Submit. You will see an animation showing that MOSS is working, and then you will be brought back to the Form Library page. The status of your workflow should show as complete, since the workflow does not actually do anything.

I will now quickly show how to access your initiation data from your workflow. We will simple pull out the string entered and log it.

Open your workflow project in Visual Studio, and open your workflow in design view. Add a new logToHistoryListActivity as shown below, and set the HistoryDescription property as shown (set it to a String Field named HistoryDescription in your workflow).

Right click your logToHistoryListActivity and select Generate Handlers. In the event handler, add code as show below:

public String HistoryDescription;
private void logToHistoryListActivity1_MethodInvoking(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
      String MySettingValue = workflowProperties.InitiationData;
      HistoryDescription = "Initiation String Entered: " + MySettingValue;
}

Rebuild and deploy your workflow, and execute it as in Step 19. Click on the Completed link as shown below.

In the Workflow Status you will now see a history event as shown below, and the initiation string is shown as an XML string, with a <MySetting> element and the string I entered. To use this data in a workflow, you would parse the XML and go from there (or generate a class from the schema and load the XML into that).

Well, there it is. A custom Initiation form using InfoPath.

Next time – custom Task forms!