With the new release of K2 five and it’s workflow designer, we do not have the capability to write custom code in our workflow anymore. For some, this is a shocker and unbelievable. Having no code in your workflow has been a best practice for some organizations for years and as a low-code platform, it’s a nobrainer. However, there are requirements that always required code in the past, one of those Asynchronous server events.
All the latest updates from K2 have had some “pluming” done for easier access to K2 Services like the Worklist and SmartObjects. The K2 sync services are designed to be used for mobile applications.
Just a few months later, K2 has released a iPhone and BlackBerry app to handle your worklist on your phone. The apps are very easy to use and require you to have the K2 Services installed and configured correctly.
In my previous post, I wrote about the new Workflow Client Services that are available within K2.
In my post, I created a small worklist page fully based on javascript/jquery/json. Eric Schaffer has made this video describing how you can do this, even creating a action pull down.
The video is on youtube, so here’s a direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKIv6C8WnLI
Since the coming of the K2 SmartObject Service in KB1230 , people might have noticed the smartobjectVersion parameter in the managedEndpoints definition. Since SmartObjects have been around, they always had a version. The version number starts at 0 (zero) and increases by 1 (one) when the SmartObject is deployed.
Recently in one of our projects, we had to do some performance optimizations that required us to look a bit closer at the resources our application used. In general, you should always dispose an object that’s implementing the IDisposable interface.
K2’s client API’s use a connection to the K2 server which needs to be closed and disposed after you’re done using them. In C# you can use the using-statement to dispose your objects when you’re done with it. The using-statement only works on objects that inherits from IDisposable.
Here are some examples of how to correctly use the using-statement when using K2 API’s.
In the 1200 series, a few new web services are available out of the box. In this article I’ll tell you what they are for, how you can use them and give some insight on the technical details behind the services to make you understand them better.
There are two services new to K2 in the 1200 series:
- K2 Services
- K2 SmartObject Services
The K2 Services were first introduced in the KB001200 Update which contains a WS and WCF endpoint. A later release will bring REST-enabled endpoints for the K2 Services. The SmartObject Services are released in KB001230.
This post will cover the KB001200 and KB0001230 release functionality. The additional REST-enabled endpoints for K2 Services will be discussed in a separate post once released.
Since the release of K2 4.5 back in April, it’s been a bit quite of time before we got something new. We’ve seen the K2 components for SharePoint 2010 been release, but that didn’t bring any new functionality to the table. For those who don’t know, it “only” provides the same functionality of the SharePoint 2007 components. This doesn’t mean guys in South Africa have only been watching the worldcup, they’ve been working on a beauty called the 1200 series, which starts with the KB001200 update release.
Last October I had the privilege to visit the K2 Insiders conference. We all got to see a preview of K2’s new 4.5 release. Now (finally!) a targeted beta is available for selected partners, customers and insiders. This blog post will focus on Inline functions, a new feature of the 4.5 release which will be available for K2 blackpoint 4.5 and K2 blackpearl 4.5. The new release also features improvements to the designers, as you can read in Jey’s blogpost.
At the K2 conference, we also got information on what K2 will do with SharePoint 2010. As you can see in this post, K2 is working hard to enhance the new functionality of the Office 2010 platform. Personally, i really like the integration with the office applications itself as lots of clients actually don’t want to leave outlook.
Apart from this new functionality, K2 will also support the current functionality in SP2010, which we saw a demo of at the conference.
K2 Insider Conference Last weekend was the K2 insider Conference in Las Vegas. They neatly planned it just before the SharePoint Conference to make it more easy for us to come over. This post will not cover a lot of info that’s been said at the conference, some of it is even under NDA, so I’m simply not allowed to blog about, which is a shame, as I can’t wait to get all those new bits!