Custom visual studio Workflow deployment with Site Definition

Question

In Production Environment : We have Custom Workflows in a Visual studio Project, each time we create a Site based on Site definition we have to reassign workflow association from visual studio. How to avoid this problem ?

In Live Environment : How can we deploy workflows with our Site Definition (list Definition and content types) ?

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I would go for:

1. Make the workflow attach himself to a content type. You could easily do this by adding the Content Type to your solution (deploy via a Site Collection scoped feature - recomanded) and irrelevant of whether you have or not a Site Definition, everywhere where the Content Type gets deployed and used (with the workflow code too of course) it will attached automatically. Here example of declarative connecting them http://howtosharepoint.blogspot.ch/2010/05/custom-workflow-not-available-to-be.html
2. In the Feature Activated receiver you could programatically attach the workflow to either list, site, etc. depending of course of your workflow intended use. Attaching programatically here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spcontenttype.workflowassociations.aspx or here http://www.thorntontechnical.com/tech/sharepoint/sharepoint-2010-associate-workflow-to-content-type-in-a-feature