The Problem Solver

I have been a little frustrated in being unable to find a good solution for the following problem. If anyone has a good suggestion the feedback would be appreciated greatly.

Suppose I have a custom activity named CustomEventActivity that implements IEventActivity. The activity is used in a state workflow. This activity receives an event containing some data and saves this data so a second activity in the same EventDrivenActivity can check on the data. Something like:

protected override ActivityExecutionStatus

Execute(ActivityExecutionContext executionContext)

{

WorkflowQueuingService wqs =

 executionContext.GetService<WorkflowQueuingService>();

WorkflowQueue queue = wqs.GetWorkflowQueue(QueueName);

MyProperty = queue.Dequeue() as string;

return ActivityExecutionStatus.Closed;

}

Now I need to check on the data saved in MyProperty in a second activity in the same EventDrivenActivity. Beecause of the spawned context I can’t just use this.myCustomActivity1.MyProperty as this just returns the template activity with an empty property.

In a CodeActivity I can do something like:

EventDrivenActivity eventDriven;

CodeActivity code = sender as Activity;

eventDriven = code.Parent;

CustomEventActivity act1 = eventDriven.GetActivityByName(myCustomActivity1.QualifiedName, true) as CustomEventActivity;

Now this is cumbersome and error prone so I don’t like it

But things get worse if you want to use the value in a Declarative Rule Condition. Now it needs to be a single expression and we are located a little further inside the activity tree. I would need to use: ((CustomEventActivity)((Activity)sender).Parent.Parent.Parent.GetActivityByName(myCustomActivity1.QualifiedName, true)).MyProperty

Big yikes

Now I could just add a single property to the workflow and bind to that but in that case I would need to define extra properties on the workflow level that really have no purpose being there. Two additional problems:

1. If I want to use XAML workflows I would need to define the properties in base class, making it unusable when users want to expand the XAML workflow in a rehosted designer.
2. It is no longer possible to use a ReplicatorActity with ExecutionType is parallel. After all each parallel executing branch would point to the same activity.