Update Variables through Global Interactive

Question

Hi,
I need to update some project variables through a global interactive activity.However,the only problem is that my global interactive does not have instance access.This is so because of i am trying to club two or three funtonalities at one place so that the user has less number of clicks.Hence can anybody suggest any other alternative way to acheive the same.
Any kind of suggestions will be of great help...
Ritu

Answer 1

Backing up a bit, a correlation is like a primary key on a database table. It is a way you can uniquely identify and notify a work item instance in a process. Notifications into a process can either use the unique id.id (e.g. "/ProcessName#Default-1.0/1/0@ProjectName") which is difficult to determine, or a correlation (e.g. order "22378").
As a developer, there are quite a few moving parts to getting this to work using a Message Wait activity that has an interrupt. Not trying to dissuade you, but I believe you might find that there are more "clicks" that the end user has to do using this technique than if you used a Global Interactive that has instance access.
If you have not done this before, here are the high level steps you'll need to do as a developer:
A. Set up the Message Wait activity flow:
1. Add a Message Wait activity outside of any transitions currently in your process.
2. Change the Message Wait activity's property to "Allows interruptions"
3. Change the Message Wait activity to receive input argument(s)
4. Modify the Message Wait activity to receive the correlation
5. Add an Interactive or Automatic activity beside the Message Wait activity
6. Add a transition from the Message Wait activity to the Interactive or Automatic activity.
7. Add the logic inside the Interactive or Automatic activity to update the project variables and to send the work item instance back to where it was interrupted in the process.
B. Create the correlation in the process
1. Create the correlation inside the process for the instance using either an automatic activity or the Begin activity
C. Create the Global Interactive activity to Notify the process
1. Add a Global Interactive activity
2. Add the logic to send the notification to the specific work item instance
D. Remove the Correlation from the process
1. Once there is no more need for the correlation, remove the correlation inside an Automatic activity (commonly done in an Automatic activity just before the End activity)
In answer to your question - just a guess, but you are getting the correlation error probably because you might not have done one or more of these items listed above correctly (specifically items A3, A4, B1 and / or C2).
Dan