K2 blackpearl 4.6.11
We have not built too many Smartforms but the few that we did used the SF only for the UI, the process was built using K2 for Visual Studio. Recently, we tried building a Smartform entirely using the browser-based K2 Designer and ran into several issues that required workarounds and took a lot of time to resolve.
1. Tasks require one outcome per action. It’s not possible to route to Activity 1..N based on value of a string/environment variable, need workaround to create dummy activity, etc. In Visual Studio K2 process design, we can define 1 action and multiple outcomes through line rules. How can this be done in SF?
2. There is no ability to run onload code for an activity to, for instance, log data to an Oracle table when an activity is initiated. In Visual Studio process design, we can create Client/Server events for each activity where we can write db operations code etc. How can this be done in K2 Designer?
3. No easy way to run a process in test mode where ALL actions/destinations are routed to initiator instead of real users. In VS, we can use logical If/Expressions/String Fields values etc while assigning the Activity Participants. Again, how to do this in K2 Designer?
4. Context Browser is not always available for all tasks (to drag/drop environment variables into the process) .
5. Our business process requires that every activity provide an action to "consult" any of the previous participants in the process. Similar to #1, we were able to eassily achieve this using VS and custom code but not sure how to do this using K2 Designer.
Overall, the promise of K2 Smartforms has been that it is a rapid development tool and enables customers to quickly build out forms/interfaces and processes compared to .NET UI and VS/blackpearl process but we don't exactly see the benefits. Are we missing anything?
Thanks