As always things are never as simple as you thought they would be. This post is a case in point, so I have been building a workflow which allows a user to approve a list item. This workflow is built with VS2005 and with previous workflows, the modification forms have worked beautifully.

Well that is until I wanted to include the contact selector inside the modification form. As I mentioned the workflow allows a user to approve the list item, however what if the user is away or want someone else to approve it. Well then a simple workflow modification should sort that, shouldn’t it?!

In order to create a workflow modification you need to do the following:-

We will not cover points 1 and 2 as they are discussed in this great post ([insert url]).

So starting with point 3 firstly, so what does an EnableWorkflowModification activity do?

Using a tool called xsd which is part of the VS2005 toolkit. Basically with every InfoPath form there is a XML schema created (.xsd file) if we call xsd /c with the path of the XSD then a code class will be created which is used for serialization/deserialization.

In our example we use the serialization class to create a class of the form and then assign values to the various properties of the class. We can then serialize this class to make the xml.

This would be achieved like so:-

ReassingForm reassignForm=new ReassingForm();

reassignForm.ReassingComments = "The workflow is being reassinged from " + m_sApproverLogin;

reassingForm.Approver = ApproverArray;

Here we are assigning the current approver and also uploading some comments to the form, which the user can then update as required.

Finally the class needs to be serialized :-

Now when the workflow modification kicks in then a user gets a link in the workflow status page allowing them to perform the modification. When this is clicked then the Context Data is loaded into the InfoPath form and the InfoPath form is displayed.

When the contact selector is used an error will occur complaining about the fact that the my namespace prefix is not found. So how do we get around this?

We need to tell the serialization method that it should add my prefixes so the xml instead of being like this :-

is like this:-

To do this we need to use the XmlSerializerNamespaces class.
This would look like:-

and can be used when calling XmlSerializer.Serialize as additional parameter.
This will then fix the error on form and allow the contact selector to be able to process and store the users that you have provided.

Let me know how you get on.