Artezio SharePoint 2013 Workflow Activities for VS & Actions for Designer

We have recently released a new feature for our SharePoint 2013 Workflow Activities, namely an open source project that allows using our activities in SharePoint Designer 2013 (called actions here). These actions can be used both in SharePoint Online and on premise environments, as we use a No Code Sandbox Solution approach. Looking at the challenges we have faced, I’d like to share how the project started, and the goal we tried to achieve.

During the development of a Help Desk app, we faced a problem of a lack of information about a new REST API provided by SharePoint 2013. It seemed that there were no methods to set unique permissions to webs, lists and items. First, we tried to call REST methods by url, using a trial and error approach, and then we found out a method that we investigated in order to name it correctly. Our investigation resulted in 2 blog posts: SharePoint 2013 REST API – How to set Unique Permissions (Item Level Permissions) and SharePoint 2013 REST API: learning to use it without documentation. Then we used the approach in the activities we needed for Help Desk. It took a significant amount of time, and finally we decided to share it with the SharePoint community. We designed several activities that provided everything needed to work with unique permissions in a Workflow, showcased them in a test App project and shared everything on codeplex.com.

We received a positive feedback from the community and also several ideas how to improve the project. One of the ideas was to deliver our activities to SharePoint Designer, not only Visual Studio. Today we are proud to say that this feature has been accomplished.