Hello ladies & gentlemen! It’s about time for a fresh new Service Market, isn’t it?
It’s of course filled with Easter eggs, or maybe not. But at least one new requested feature: Order comment chat and mails. First and foremost, a requesting user can now answer his/her approver when they ask stuff, or make weird demands :), so navigate to Manage – Order – My Requests, pick your pending Order, and chat away!
Also, when a requesting user or approver sends a comment, there is now the option to have a notification mail sent to the other party. Turn this on in the Configurator, under the Services tab – General – Send Comment Update Mails.
We’ve also fixed a few glitches – among them the combo box Product Question that in some cases simply didn’t work.
As an experimental bonus feature for the brave ones there is now a *secret* (meaning basically untested) new activity in the AteaSpintop.Activities.Common namespace named OrderToJSON. With this you can serialize the whole order object inside your workflow to a JSON string. Now this might seem underwhelming, but the idea is that you can then throw it to the RunPowershellWithParameters activity and knead the actual Order to your liking, and then use the output from that and deserialize it back by setting the Reverse property. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? … Those of you familiar with the RunPowershell activity will think “But it doesn’t give me a string back!” But it does now (the OutputObjects‘ ToString() all concatenated to one string property: OutputString – to get technical)!
“Well – this is all good and well, but give us a use case will you?” – As an easy example let’s change the domain of all mails sent in the workflow by running the Order serialized to Json through this powershell, and then back:
param (
[string]$Json
)
Write-Output $Json.Replace(“@mydomain.com”, “@myotherdomain.com”);
And you can do whatever you want inside the order in the Powershell… you get the OrderId, requesting user, approvers and so on readily available to your fancy scripts just as easy as a call to | ConvertFrom-Json. Have a go and tell us what amazing stuff you make with this… and of course how bad things break when you mess it up!
That’s basically it for this time around! Happy Easter and enjoy installing and upgrading!