Set arguments on inner activities

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We would like to make workflows designed by end users.
I was able to store some workflow definitions in the database, reload them and make them work in a service.

For the user to be able to create workflows, we need to create our own activities. I would like to pass non simple arguments (ie List<guid>, List<string>) to inner activities. I read many articles about passing arguments but I was unable to find one that suits my needs, all articles show how to pass argument to main workflow activity only (using Dictionary<string,> in WorkflowInvoker.Invoke method).

We have a library with a CodeActivity Activity1 with an argument Arg1 (List<string>).
End-user will use this library to create a new Activity (a sequence for example).

Activity1 act1 = new Activity1();
act1.Arg1 = new InArgument<List<string>>(new List<string> { "a", "b", "c" });

Sequence seq = new Sequence
{
    Activities = { act1 }; 
}

// Now serialize end user workflow
Stream newStream = ...;
XamlWriter l_xamlWriter = ActivityXamlServices.CreateBuilderWriter(new XamlXmlWriter(newStream, new XamlSchemaContext()));

XamlServices.Save(l_xamlWriter, seq);

How can I initialize argument with a list ? (the former code fails with 'Literal': Literal only supports value types and the immutable type System.String).

Is there a way to pass such arguments to inner activities or a way to translate these arguments into VisualBasicValue or CSharpValue programmatically to allow to serialize workflow definitions ? We don't want to set these arguments each time we run the workflow, we want the value to be stored in the definition.

Any help would be appreciated :-)

Posted 26-Oct-15 6:08am

Christophe_

Updated 28-Oct-15 1:46am

v3

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Christophe_ · Answer 1 · 2015-10-28T01:45:00

The only way I found was to wrap the sequence into a DynamicActivity and to pass parameters to the WorkflowApplication (or WorkflowInvoker) :

C#

Activity1 act1 = new Activity1();
act1.Arg1 = new InArgument<collection><string>>(new VisualBasicValue<collection><string>>("MyVals"));

Sequence seq = new Sequence
{
    Activities = { act1 }; 
}

DynamicActivity da = new DynamicActivity()
{
    Name = "test",
    Implementation = () => seq,
    Properties = 
             {
                 new DynamicActivityProperty()
                 {
                     Name = "MyVals",
                     Type = typeof(InArgument<collection><string>>),
                     Value = null
                 },
             }
};



WorkflowInvoker.Invoke(da, new Dictionary<string,> { { "MyVals", new Collection<string>{ "a", "b", "c" } } });</string></string></collection></string></collection></string></collection>

So much code just to pass a list...