Workflow Foundation 4 - Showing Workflow Progress

Question

In a project that we are using WF4, it is a requirement to show our users a friendly list of the steps of the workflow (the logical steps from the users point of view, not the technical steps) along with each step's status ( like a big green check mark if the step has been completed).

I'm wondering if this is something that Workflow tracking should be used for or not. My impression from what I have read about workflow tracking is that it is really more for technical logging.

The alternatives would be persisting an ordered list of steps and their statuses along with the workflow or outside of the workflow.

Either way I'm fuzzy about how this should work and appreciate suggestions.

Answer 1

Workflow Services would be very useful for you. This is some sort of convergence point between wf and wcf and used to marshal WCF services calls to WF instances. You can create a duplex channel and receive updates via callback channel.

Answer 2

You can use workflow tracking to register activity execution and use the WorkflowDesigner to show the progress to the user. There is an example of how to do this in the WF4 samples from Microsoft you can find here .