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How to Use Visual Studio to Create a Service Manager Workflow

  • Article

Applies To: System Center 2012 - Service Manager

[This topic is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]

Service Manager can use Windows Workflow Foundation through any management pack. This enables you to execute business logic on enterprise management objects (EMO). Workflows used by Service Manager are standard .NET Framework 3.5 binaries that contain a Windows Workflow–based class. The following procedures show how to create and configure a workflow with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. The examples build out a simple DLL that is used by other topics in the SDK.

Tip

You can also use the System Center 2012 – Service Manager Authoring Tool to design workflows.

To create a new Sequential Workflow Library project

  1. To open the project template window, create a new project or add a new project to an existing solution.

  2. Target the .NET Framework version 3.5.

  3. Under the Workflow template category, select Sequential Workflow Library.

    Tip

    You can use any project type as long as it compiles to a DLL.

  4. Set the project name to WorkflowPackageRequest, and click OK.

  5. After the project is created, right-click the project in the Solution Explorer window and then click Add Reference.

  6. When the Add Reference dialog appears, click the Browse tab, locate the three SDK binaries, and add all three by holding down the CTRL key and clicking each one. After all three are selected, click OK. For information about these binaries, see Getting Started.

To design the workflow

  1. Rename the workflow file from Workflow1.cs to PackageInitial.cs.

    Tip

    If Visual Studio prompts you to rename all references, select Yes.

  2. With the designer for PackageInitial opened, expand the Toolbox tab if it is not already expanded and drag the Code item located under the Windows Workflow v3.0 category to the area of the designer that contains the text Drop Activities to create a Sequential Workflow.

  3. Select the newly created Code activity and rename it from codeActivity1 to ObjectCreatedCodeActivity in the Properties window.

  4. Switch the Properties window to display the events of the Code activity by clicking the events button (the lightning bolt).

  5. Double-click the ExecuteCode item to auto-generate the event handler.

To add properties to the workflow

  1. In the code viewer of the PackageInitial workflow, add the following using statements to import the required Service Manager namespaces.

    using Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement;
using Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Common;
using Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Configuration;

  2. Create a new Guid property named InternalID. Supply both get and set accessors.

  3. Create a new Guid property named ClassGUID. Supply both get and set accessors.

As shown in the following example, the management pack subscription action that calls this workflow has to be configured to provide the required data to these properties. The workflow must get the specific object that the management pack defined as being tied to the workflow. This will be supplied on the InternalID property and is the GUID of the object instance in Service Manager. The ClassGUID property is just an easy reference of the type of object instance identified by the InternalID property. This is the GUID of the object’s class type in Service Manager.

public Guid ClassGUID { get; set; }
public Guid InternalID { get; set; }

To code the workflow

  1. In the code viewer of the PackageInitial workflow, find the code activity’s ExecuteCode method named ObjectCreatedCodeActivity_ExecuteCode.

  2. Connect to the management group server, localhost.

  3. Use the entity-types API to get the object instance that this workflow will run against.

  4. Get the management pack class of the object instance.

  5. Set the DisplayName property of the object instance.

  6. Save the changes to the object instance by calling the Commit method.

The preceding procedure used the activity’s event handler. Alternatively, you could subscribe to the Initialized and Completed events of the workflow itself.

As shown in the following example, the connection to the Service Manager store is connecting to localhost because the workflow instance is always executed on the server.

private void ObjectCreatedCodeActivity_ExecuteCode(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // Create a connection to the local server
    EnterpriseManagementGroup mg = new EnterpriseManagementGroup("localhost");
    
    // Get the object instance triggering the workflow
    EnterpriseManagementObject packageInstance = mg.EntityObjects.GetObject<EnterpriseManagementObject>(InternalID, ObjectQueryOptions.Default);

    // We know the class used by the object instance, so use the workflow parameter supplied property
    ManagementPackClass packageClass = mg.EntityTypes.GetClass(ClassGUID);

    // Set the DisplayName of the workflow so we know it went through the workflow
    packageInstance[packageClass, "DisplayName"].Value += " WENT THROUGH WORKFLOW";

    // Save the object changes
    packageInstance.Commit();
}

To install and debug the workflow

  1. After compiling the workflow, copy the workflow binary to the %programfiles%\Microsoft System Center\Service Manager 2010 folder on the management group servers that will contain the management pack referencing the workflow.

  2. To debug the workflow, copy the .pdb file together with the .dll into the Service Manager directory.

  3. To trigger the debugger, insert calls to the Break method into the workflow code.

When the workflow is initiated and a code line with the break is executed, the standard debugging dialog box appears. This requires that you have Visual Studio installed on the server.

See Also

Concepts

Workflow Overview

Other Resources

Scenario: Coding a Workflow