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Forms and workflow solutions

Central and Workflow and SAP

For workflow-based processes, Winshuttle Designer is the tool that brings it all together. In Winshuttle Designer, you combine SAP upload and download scripts created with Winshuttle Transaction and Winshuttle Query with forms and workflow to build a complete solution that automates an entire business process. This solution constitutes a number of different artifacts:

  • Workflow definition
  • Form view(s)
  • Transaction script(s)
  • Query scripts(s)

Winshuttle has the concept of a solution package, which is a file that contains all of the above. This solution package, created with Winshuttle Designer, allows you to manage a solution as a whole. You are not required to publish each individual component when deploying a solution. Winshuttle Designer has the capability of publishing a complete solution with one command.

In addition, the solution package includes deployment profiles. A deployment profile describes all of the variables that are specific to an environment such as server names, web service URLs, etc. When you publish the complete solution, you simply select which deployment profile you want to use. As such, you can easily publish the same solution to different environments facilitating migration between development, QA and production. Winshuttle Designer will automatically replace URLs that are embedded in the form views, saving you lots of time.

Environment Management

In order to put in place a solution development structure that maximizes productivity and minimizes potential bugs that reach the end users, it is a common best practice to have multiple environments (e.g. Dev, QA, Prod) that any solution modification will have to advance through.

Since a forms and workflow solution include custom web forms and workflows, you will need a number of non-production environments of both SharePoint (with Central and Workflow) as well as Winshuttle Server.

Multiple non-production environments may share the same SharePoint infrastructure. For example, both Dev and QA can be hosted by one SharePoint farm in separate site collections. Likewise, one Winshuttle Server deployment can be utilized for multiple non-production configurations.

For the Production environment, it is recommended to always have dedicated deployments of all server products.

Moving a forms and workflow solution from one environment (e.g. Dev) to another (e.g. Prod) entails the following steps:

  • Replicate and populate security groups
  • Migrate supporting SharePoint lists
  • Publish Winshuttle solution package