ClientData: How to configure UI behavior

Maybe yo have seen ClientData property in WFManualWorkItem class and you wonder what this property is for.

Well, let's take a look at WebForm AgileShape(AgileWork).

If you configure it it Envision, you can configure a URL (with context parameters), and you can configure the controls behavior, you can set if you want a control to be readonly, hidden,...

If you do that in a template and run the process, you can get the instance of the WFManualWorkItem in runtime and you will see that the content of ClientData property is the configuration that you have set in Envision.

Using the AgilePoint wep application template in Visual Studio you will see that controls behavior is applied automatically by the WFWorkSheetPage class.

So, what's the idea behind this?

Te idea is provide a mechanism to pass UI configuration from design time to UI runtime, this is the information flow:

• Designer sets UI configuration in Envision.
• This configuration is saved as AgileWork descriptor configuration.
• At runtime AgileWork takes configuration and (in an event where the WFManualWorkItem already exists, for example AssignWorkItem) the AgileWork writes the content of ClientData for each workitem.
• When the UI (in our sample the aspx page) is presented, the UI code retrieves the WFManualWorkItem(using the WorktemID) and applies the configuration that has been set at design time and written at runtime in AgilePoint server.

I think this is a powerful approach, don't you think so?