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Reusing Parameterized Workflow and Deploy Services

Workflow and Deploy Services allow an additional level of reuse of common Activities across the enterprise, much like a Workflow library of Activities. By automatically inheriting all the environment settings of their parent Workflow, Workflow and Deploy Services can be defined once and reused to n number of Remote Agents across the enterprise. This means that, for example, a Deploy Service that contains Activities with host information specific to individual application servers can be defined once and if inserted into Workflows associated with different machines, can automatically inherit the required host information.

The process for adding Workflow and Deploy Services is very similar to that of defining new Workflows. However, because Workflow and Deploy Services are stateless, they do not have some of the additional configuration associated with a Workflow, such as machine-specific information, scheduling and continuous integration properties. Once defined, a Workflow or Deploy Service is easily added to a parent Workflow by clicking on the “Add Activity” button and adding the desired Activities from the Workflow Service or Deploy Service plug-ins. Any parameters within Activities belonging to the included Workflow or Deploy Services  will automatically show in the added Activity. At that point, you can either statically define the parameter within the parent Workflow or choose to leave them as undefined parameters, in which case users will be prompted to supply values at execution time.

It is important to remember that Workflow and Deploy Services will run on the machine of the Workflow to which they are added. This means that when added to a local “My Computer” Workflow, the Service will attempt to run locally. Further documentation on the definition and setup can be found in the Workflow and Deploy Services sections of the documentation.