Trying to Reach the Apex of an SPD WF

Question

My company uses a homegrown Apex (Oracle Application Express) ticketing system to assign internal tickets to our various teams. My present challenge is to use SharePoint Designer (SPD) to programmatically logon to the ticketing system, and pass the required parameters to it to create a new ticket.

I've tried to setup a database connection in SPD, but it looks like I can only surface read-only data that way (am I wrong?)

If the database connection won't work, how can I build an ECT to hit an Apex database?

If that won't work, is a custom activity my best shot?

Thank you in advance for your help, it's greatly appreciated!!

Answer 1

Since what you are trying to accomplish can't be done via a simple web service call (with an authentication method SPD support), a custom workflow action would be the way to go. Microsoft has a good tutorial on how to create custom workflow actions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365trainingcourse_lab_3_2_topic3.aspx

Answer 2

Anything that has to do with a programmatic procedure should be done using a custom workflow, and cannot be solved using SPD. You need to look into doing a custom workflow with Visual Studios. Go here to get you started: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ff623018.aspx