Validating a XOML workflow

If you're using workflow assemblies, there is no need to validate your workflow since the compilation process has already done this for you. But if you're working with XOML files you'll probably want to validate it at some point before deploying it. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anything provided by Windows Workflow just to validate a workflow. The workaround is to start up the runtime and load up your XOML and see what errors you get. You can use something like the following (ripped off and modified from a newsgroup posting) -

      WorkflowRuntime workflowRuntime = new WorkflowRuntime();
      workflowRuntime.StartRuntime();

      StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(xomlString);
      XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(stringReader);
      try
      {
        instance = workflowRuntime.CreateWorkflow(reader);
      }
      catch (WorkflowValidationFailedException exp)
      {

        StringBuilder errors = new StringBuilder();

        foreach (ValidationError error in exp.Errors)
        {
          errors.AppendLine(error.ToString());
        }

        MessageBox.Show(errors.ToString(), "Validation errors");
        retVal = false;
      }

One thing to be aware of is that you can't add the x:Class attribute when you use this technique (which you must add if you want to compile your XOML later on). This Catch-22 can be quite easily solved and I'll talk about it in a later post.

If you're wondering why you'd use XOML, I think it probably makes sense when you're automatically generating your workflows from some other source.