Monday, June 6, 2011

My SharePoint Designer Wish List

If you have worked with SharePoint Designer for any length of time, there are probably numerous features you wish you had, but don't.  As Microsoft would state: "Use Visual Studio instead!"  Well, in many scenarios, using Visual Studio simply is not an option because the environment dictates that workflow development cannot be published using Visual Studio.  Therefore, I am forced to use SharePoint Designer. 

Given this forced restriction, below is a brief list of features and capabilities that I wish I could use in SharePoint Designer:
  1. Be able to copy and paste from any dialog regardless of whether it is a String Builder Dialog or an E-mail message dialog
  2. Be able to drag and drop actions from one step to any other step
  3. Be able to copy and paste existing actions within a workflow
  4. Be able to use Encoded Absolute Url for Lists other than Document Libraries
  5. Be able to move actions in and out of if/else blocks
  6. Be able to right click on any action and convert it to a snippet
  7. Be able to move back and forth between design view and code view similar to designing and developing with ASP.Net Web Forms
  8. Provide a design surface similar to Visual Studio with drag and drop capabilities of any action, condition, step etc.
  9. Be able to design a "SharePoint Designer-compatible worklow" in Visual Studio and import it into SharePoint Designer
  10. Be able to put break points, debug assertions or traces in a workflow
  11. Be able to step into and out of workflows by attaching to a SharePoint process
  12. Be able to output Debug or Logging messages to a log file or to a Web Part, MessageBox window etc.
  13. Be able to re-use content types across several Collect Data steps
  14. After deleting a conditional statement, be able to move the statements nested within the conditional statement elsewhere.
  15. After adding a lookup for a user, be able to view and edit the details for the user lookup.

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