Invoke Child Workflow Activity Asynchronously

Question

Team:

I need to invoke a WF activity (XAML) from a WF service (XAMLX) asynchronously. I am already referencing the Microsoft.Activities.Extensions framework and I'm running on the Platform Update 1 for the state machine -- so if the solution is already in one of those libraries I'm ready!

Now, I need to invoke that activity (XAML) asynchronously -- but it has an output parameter that needs to set a variable in the service (XAMLX). Can somebody please provide me a solution to this?

Thanks!

---

* UPDATE *

Now I can post pictures, * I think *, because I have enough reputation! Let me put a couple out here and try to better explain my problem. The first picture is the WF Service that has the two entry points for the workflow -- the second is the workflow itself.

This workflow is an orchestration mechanism that constantly restarts itself, and has some failover mechanisms (e.g. exit on error threshold and soft exit) so that we can manage our queue of durable transactions using WF!

Now, we had this workflow working great when it was all one WF Service because we could call the service, get a response back and send the value of that response back into another entry point in a trigger to issue a soft exit. However, a new requirement has arrisen asking us to make the workflow itself a WF activity in another project and have the Receive/Send-Reply sequences in the WF Service Application project.

However, we need to be able to startup this workflow and forget about it -- then let it know somehow that a soft exit is necessary later on down the road -- but since WF executes on a single thread this has become a bit challenging at best.

Answer 1

Strictly speaking in XAML activities Parallel and ParallelForEach are how you perform asynchrony.

The workflow scheduler only uses a single thread (much like UI) so any activity that is running will typically be running on the same thread, unless it implements AsyncCodeActivity, in which case you are simply handing back the scheduler thread to the runtime while waiting for a callback from whichever async code your AsyncCodeActivity implementation is calling.

Therefore are you sure this is what you want to achieve? Do you mean you want to run it after you have sent your initial response? In this case place your activity after the Send Reply.

Please provide more info if these suggestions don't answer your question./

Update: The original requirement posed (separating implementation from the service Receive/Send activities) may actually be solved by hosting the target activity as a service. See the following link http://blog.petegoo.com/index.php/2011/09/02/building-an-enterprise-workflow-system-with-wf4/