Sharepoint 2010 : Designing Workflows with Visio 2010 (part 1) - Designing a Visio Workflow

A common practice in organizations is for a business analyst to work with business users in Visio when designing workflows. The end result, a Visio diagram, is handed to a developer where it is then turned into a SharePoint Designer workflow or Visual Studio workflow.

Visio 2010 provides a new template specifically for designing workflows that can be imported directly into a SharePoint Designer workflow. Figure 1 shows the Visio 2010 home page where you can select the Microsoft SharePoint Workflow.

Figure 1. Microsoft Visio 2010 provides a new workflow template for creating SharePoint workflows that can be imported into SharePoint Designer 2010

Selecting the SharePoint Workflow template opens up the shape stencils specifically for SharePoint workflows. Each of these shapes relate to the actions and conditions that are available in SharePoint Designer. Similar to any Visio diagram, these shapes can be dragged on to the canvas to build out a full workflow solution. Figure 2 shows all the available action shapes for a workflow. Each shape reflects a default action, so dragging it onto the canvas has the same effect as adding the action to the SharePoint Designer canvas. It is not possible to define the properties on the shapes, however. For example, adding the Log to history list action does not allow you to define the message you are logging to history. These properties still have to be set after the workflow has been imported into SharePoint Designer.

Figure 2. The Visio shape stencils for SharePoint workflows contain shapes for each of the default actions and conditions in SharePoint Designer

Even though the properties cannot be set by the workflow designer from within Visio, you can still add details to each step, specifying what any values should be. This additional description can be added directly on the design canvas and will be ignored by SharePoint Designer on import.

Designing a Visio Workflow

Let’s look at an example of how a workflow can start its life in Visio and get transformed into a fully deployed SharePoint workflow solution. The example we are going to use is a simple Expense approval process. A SharePoint list is used by employees to request expense approval. If the amount is greater than $1,000, then the expense needs to be approved by a director; otherwise, it can be approved by the requestor’s manager.

Figure 3 shows our workflow designed in Visio. As you can see, it is not too complicated, but you can also see how easy it is to determine the approval flow.

Figure 3. The SharePoint workflow shapes allow you to build a diagram using conditions and actions such as log to history, get approval, and so on

You can see that we also added a general description and some detail at each step to assist the workflow developer when filling in the properties in SharePoint Designer. Now all that has to be done is to save this Visio file and get it to the workflow developer. Once the developer receives and understands the flow, he can select to Export the diagram from the Process tab in Visio. This will check the workflow for errors and, upon success, will export to a .vwi (Visio Workflow Interchange) file, which can be imported into SharePoint Designer.