Tutorial: Hello World

If there were a time machine, it would be tempting to go back to the 1970’s and attempt to prevent the norm from developing that requires every introductory tutorial to include “Hello World”.  Alas this is not possible, so the following tutorial will output “Hello World” to a message box.

Topics Discussed

• Creating a workflow
• Dragging and dropping Activities
• Changing a property
• Running a workflow
• Parameterization of Inputs

Procedure

1. Click New in the ribbon bar to create a new workflow project named “HelloWorld”
   
2. Expand the Visualization Activity Pack in the Toolbox and drag the MessageBox activity to the canvas.
   
3. PowerWF will select “messageBoxActivity1” and set the property viewer to display its properties. Click next to the ContentText property and type “Hello World”.
   
4. Click the “Start” button on the ribbon bar to compile and run the workflow.
   
5. When the workflow runs, it create a simple message box with the text “Hello World”
   
6. Now that the “Hello World” workflow is functional, it can be expanded to output whatever text is entered by the user. To create an input parameter, select “messageBoxActivity1” and double-click the barrel icon next to” ContentText” in the property viewer. This will open a dialog to bind the “ContentText” to a variable.
   
7. Click on the “Bind to a new member” tab and change “messageBoxActivity1_ContentText1” into something more friendly like “outputText”. Click OK to close the dialog box.
   
8. Click the “Parameters” button on the ribbon bar and click the input checkbox next to “outputText”. This will tell the workflow that “outputText” is an input that must be specified by the user at run time. Click OK to close the dialog.
   
9. Click “Start” on the ribbon bar to run the workflow. When the “Input Parameters” dialog appears, enter “Hola Mundo” and click OK. The workflow will create a message box with the text, “Hola Mundo”.
   

Summary

This tutorial showed how to create and run a single step workflow that takes an input and displays the entered text in a message box. The key takeaways of this tutorial are how to create a workflow, how to drag-and-drop activities onto the canvas, how to edit properties, how to run a workflow, and how to parameterize inputs that should be entered by the user. Subsequent tutorials will build on these concepts to create more meaningful workflows.

• #tutorial
• #powerwf