Using the StateDropDownEditor in state machine workflows

Many moons ago I wrote about creating custom state machine activities. I’ve finally got back to doing some more work on this and thought it would be nice to add a dropdown to choose the target state for my custom activity. This looks pretty easy to implement, just decorate the property with the following attribute

[Editor(typeof(StateDropDownEditor), typeof(UITypeEditor)), DefaultValue((string) null)]

Unfortunately, StateDropDownEditor is an internal class so this won’t compile. The way round this is to fire up Reflector and copy the code for the StateDropDownEditor class. Not sure what the copyright issues are for this, but it starts to solve the problem. Unfortunately the StateDropDownEditor class references a StateMachineHelpers class which is also internal. We can again use Reflector to get hold of the implementation of this class, but things can start to get messy at this point. We end up having to pull in pretty much the whole state machine infrastructure code but the solution is pretty simple, just remove the GetCurrentState method and then no more code needs to be ‘borrowed’. I now have a nice dropdown for selecting the target state.