Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Ryan Munson

John Healy

Jeffrey Anderson

Josh W Honeyman

Shiela Sogge

Jeff Anderson

John W Honeyman

A method and system for presenting workflow tracking information for approval workflows assigned to business objects is provided. The approval system receives from a user a request to display the workflow for a business object and a workflow that has been assigned to that business object. The current state of a workflow is defined by tracking information that may include a workflow approval status, an originator name of the business object, and multiple steps of the assigned workflow. Each step of a workflow may include a step name, a step approval status, approver tracking information, and optionally next steps. Each next step of the step is itself a step that may include additional next steps. The approval system may generate and display a tree-like representation of the current state of a workflow for a business object based on the tracking information.

Workflow tracking information preview

A system for providing automatic event publication relative to data owned by a service is disclosed. A service which owns data publishes internal events when data is created, updated, or deleted. These internal events are only visible by consumers on the same physical computer and running within the same process or executable. Consumers who are located remotely or in a separate process cannot subscribe to these events. Embodiments provide the ability to expose local entity create, update, and delete events as 'public' events (or out-only messages) on a service contract. This allows external consumers who may be remote and even on a different platform, to subscribe and receive notifications of when data changes in the owning service.

Automatic create, update and delete event publishing

The present invention provides an entity projection in a client. The entity projection is an encapsulation of data, from an owning service, and residing on a consumer of that service. The entity projection provides an abstraction that conforms to an entity programming model on the consumer. The entity projection may illustratively include a subset of the properties of an entity in the owning service, the subset being only those properties required by the entity and those properties desired by the consumer.

Entity projection

An abstraction for rich data access for consumers of a service in a service oriented system. The abstraction is created by the author of a service which owns the data, and includes a number of service-public properties and associations. Further, the abstraction can contain metadata and logic that provides for a rich, interactive experience for the consumer interacting with the data encapsulated by the entity agent. These can include verifying that the data conforms to the contract published by the owning service, validating and defaulting properties, and validating associated data. Also the abstraction can contains metadata and logic for transmitting of the data back to the owning service and optionally saving to the local data store of the consumer.

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Fargo, ND, United States of America

Ryan Munson