Saving a Globally Reusable Workflow as a template in SharePoint Designer

This week I made the mistake of publishing a Reusable Workflow as a Globally Reusable Workflow in SharePoint Designer, deleting the original Reusable Workflow, and then trying to save the remaining Globally Reusable Workflow as a template – well, I soon found out that you can’t!

A moment of panic set in where I thought I would have to rebuild my workflow again from scratch, but came across the “Copy and Modify” option on the workflow context menu:

This allows you to add a new Reusable Workflow back to the site using a copy of the Globally Reusable Workflow published earlier. I could then save the new Reusable Workflow as a template - Phew!

Open list item modal dialog (lightbox) with a hyperlink in SharePoint 2010

The modal dialog appears by default in SharePoint 2010 when you add, edit or view a list item from the List View Web Part. It’s the lightbox style look and feel where the background turns dark and a new dialog opens up on top, allowing you to view and edit items without having to leave the current page.

You may want to use this functionality with a hyperlink – for example in a Content Editor Web Part on a landing page. You can do this by using the code below:

<script type="text/javascript">
var options = {
url: "/Lists/Announcements/NewForm.aspx",
        title: "Add New Announcement",
        allowMaximize: true,
        showClose: true,
        width: 625,
        height: 525,
        dialogReturnValueCallback: silentCallback};
function open() {SP.UI.ModalDialog.showModalDialog(options);}
function silentCallback(dialogResult, returnValue) {
}
function refreshCallback(dialogResult, returnValue) {
    SP.UI.Notify.addNotification('Operation Successful!');
    SP.UI.ModalDialog.RefreshPage(SP.UI.DialogResult.OK);
}
</script>
<a href="javascript:open()">Click Here</a>

When you click on the “Click Here” link, it shows a dialog similar to the one pictured below:

A couple of things to note here – the “options” variable allows you to set the properties of the dialog, one of which is the dialogReturnValueCallback property. Setting this with the silentCallback function (used in the example above) returns to your landing page without a refresh. You can replace this with the refreshCallback function, which will refresh the page and show a pop-up message when an action is configured in the dialog. The best thing to do is play about with it and check out the difference.