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Home > Archive > BizTalk Server Applications Integration > August 2004 > Passing an Excel file throughout the Workflow
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Passing an Excel file throughout the Workflow
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| AwwabK 2004-07-31, 5:24 am |
| Hi,
I have a form to be filled up in Excel. And it needs to be routed for approval and approvers will edit the file to approve/Reject. I want to automate this using HWS. Can I pass the document through the whole workflow from one approver to another and let them edit the file and post it back. What would be the best way to solve this. I am using .xls file . Not using Office 2003.
Thanks in Advance,
AK | |
| Gilles [MSFT] 2004-08-02, 5:50 pm |
| Hello,
[...]
>for approval and approvers will edit the file to approve/Reject. I want
>to automate this using HWS. Can I pass the document through the whole
>workflow from one approver to another and let them edit the file and
>post it back. What would be the best way to solve this. I am using .xls
>file . Not using Office 2003.
As I am sure you ahve noticed, tghe HWS activation schema allows to pass any kind of data
in addition to the required HWS fields. However, HWS (and BizTalk) are not content management
products. This means that BizTalk (or HWS, built on top of BizTalk) is not the best way to store documents
and allow users to edit them.
So, in general, you should avoid passing Office documents to BizTalk if your orchestration treats those
documents as "opaque" (i.e. does not look into the documents, just hands it off to a port when asked).
If your orchestration treats documents as opaque, the best way to do this would be to pass a reference to
the document (perhaps an URL) and to store the document in a content management system.
A context management system could be as simple as a file share or as complex as Windows Sharepoint Services.
Your orchestration could manipulate permissions on the content manangement software to deny read and/or write
so only whoever is required to read/change the document can effectively do so.
Provided that you treat Excel documents as opaque in your orchestration, this design is superior since you send only
a few characters (the URL) instead of the whole payload (that you won't use anyway). The performances on the BizTalk
site will be way better. Moreover, you do not copy the document around: there is only one copy in the Content Management System.
WHen sending the Excel file to the orchestartion, the sender as still a copy and so will all participants. It becomes harder to merge
changes, if any.
This being said, you could pass the whole Excel to the HWS action. Since .xsl files are binary files,
you would have to encode it to pass it to the schedule (using base64 for instance). Your orchestartion would
retrieve the data in base64 from the activation message (or task response message, depending on the step)
and you would then possibly hand off the document.
If your solution does not look inside Excel documents, I strongly discourage you to send the Excel document to BizTalk.
Thanks.
-Gilles.
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| AwwabK 2004-08-05, 2:55 am |
| Thanks. -Gilles.
Regards,
Awwab. |
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