I’ve been asked to build my first content type. During the discussion it was determined for this Reporting Request workflow to create a Base “Report Asset” to be used in a workflow\survey to determine what exactly the end user is requesting. e.g. A crystal report hosted in BusinessObjects, a data dump for an excel spreadsheet, Tabular Model, SSIS ETL for a vendor….
Then once that base “Report Asset” exists we want to track dependencies of the report in another content type “Report Dependencies” each related dependency would be its own row, e.g datasource= SQL2012, Database = AdventureWorks, Command = “usp_GetOrders”, Developer = “Tom”, modified_date = now….
Another content type for future changes to the asset would track each change in a “Report Change Log” content type and another content type “Report Change Log Result”. The result log would basically track whether or not the DBA approved or rejected the change in the “Report Change Log” and the reason for failure if the Change was not approved and flag the change as back to a draft mode.
I watched a SharePoint Workflow demonstration and also have read up a bit on them and it seems I might not be able to attach individual workflow(Stages?) to the individual lists.
I was surprised I could not find an example or post for a report request workflow on the web. I am not sure if a Service Desk workflow is similar enough. I am also trying to fill out the MS content type spreadsheet and the two rows of examples they have seem very limited in explaining what default items might be in a list.
WOW… that’s a lot going on there. It seems a little heavy on building out content types just to have them. Content types essentially are containers for wrapping types of site columns together to identify a particular content.
One suggestion before building this out is to write out what business need or problem you are trying to solve and what grouping of data you need. I tried to capture some to help understand what you were doing and the below is what I have come up with:
- You want to store information about a report (data dump/excel spreadsheet or whatever it is) and have some key info on that.
- You then want to track dependencies of that report such as datasource, command, author etc.
- You then want to whether it was approved or rejected and who did that etc.
- Finally you want to run workflows on these and do some more functions around business logic for them. (may need to use SharePoint Designer for this).
So after all that is said and done, I didn’t see why you would need more than one content type for report and ensure you have metadata fields to capture the dependencies and other information about the report along with the approval etc.
I could be missing a lot of information or misinterpreted it, but that’s what I gathered from your initial request.
