Post date: Oct 01, 2010 6:46:50 AM
Sometime ago I came across the issue of handling multiple tasks in parallel and manage independentally. Turned out WWF provides a friendly replicator activity. So I decided to use it to develop a workflow that upon kick off reads items from other lists for assignment, business areas and notification lists and spwan multiple tasks dynamically in parallel. The workflow is set to be completed when all the tasks are actioned by their assignees without waiting one task to be finished before the next task is created (Parallel tasks).
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How it works
Thankfully WF comes up with a looping activity to run a specific child activity multiple times and is called Replicator activity. It has its own challenges and limitations to work within for instance, you can only add one activity as a child of a Replicator activity.
The first and foremost thing one has to get their head around is to understand what happens behind the scenes when the replicator is set to run in parallel mode. And not the least, it is important to understand the crucks about workflow execution specially for SharePoint world. Now there is heaps of documentation on MSDN on it so I wouldn't go into details but I would mention a few which I had to face when using Replicator.
One activity per replicator
Custom activity is a must if you want to run it in parallel.
Bubble up all dependency properties and events from your custom activity.
For further details and download hop on to codeplex project here.