SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow and InfoPath 2010 Notes

I was recently building up some SharePoint 2010 functionality and ran into a couple small things I would like to share.

Document Sets and InfoPath Forms

There is a new cool feature of SharePoint 2010 that allows you to modify the Update form of a SharePoint list with an InfoPath form. This is really powerful because you can now push in custom logic around the data in your lists. As well, there are Document Sets which are basically folders that can be treated like documents or list items. In SharePoint 2007 a folder was a folder. But now with SharePoint 2010 Document Sets you can create content types of this type, add on metadata, associate workflow, add security, etc. However there is a limitation of both:

· Document Sets only work in Document Libraries

· InfoPath List forms only work in SharePoint Lists.

So if you ever want to do a cross-section of both features it is currently not possible.

SharePoint Designer 2010 Multiple Person/Group Picker In InfoPath Task Form

I created a workflow in SharePoint Designer 2010. In one of the task forms I wanted to allow the user to enter in a list of people who will perform the next action in the workflow. I did not want the data to be part of the list item because I wanted the manager to determine who would these tasks and not the person who is entering the original list item. What I found out was the InfoPath form would allow me to select multiple users to perform the next step but all of the values would be lost except for the first one once I hit submit on the form. Here is a reference.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010customization/thread/e720a3e2-e33b-42d4-ad3b-40696172fcd1

This was brought up but apparently not fixed before RTM.

Workflow Coercion Exception

You may see the following exception in your SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows:

SharePoint Exception: Coercion Failed: Input cannot be null for this coercion

This exception is not that helpful but this is typically associated to when you try to set a value to an item field or internal variable of your workflow. I have seen the issue on choice fields, people pickers, etc. Instead of selecting Return field as “XXX, Comma Delimited” select “As String”. This will resolve the issue.

Visio Must be installed to Publish Workflow with Visualization

If you are creating a SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow and the checkbox to enable Visualization is disabled you need to have Visio 2010 installed on the machine where you are doing the workflow publication. This is because the Visio visualization is built when the process is published, and it NOT based on the export .vwi file. This is why the workflow visualization looks different between the Visio diagram and the work you see on the workflow status page in SharePoint for the running workflow instance.