I know I can use the External Program plugin to run Windows Powershell scripts to automate basic Windows tasks; but I am unable to interact with the Workflow job and metadata files in the same way that I can using VBScript or JavaScript.
With the popularitty of Windows Powershell in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012, can you tell me whether you plan to add support for Windows Powershell in the Run Script plugin?
Integration is planned, but I’m afraid I’m unable to give a more precise answer than that. In the meantime, continue using Run External and pass in arguments as you’ve been doing.
I search for this feature every few months and never see any updates. This feature would blast the workflow tool into the modern world. I would buy many licenses for just this feature alone. Are there any updates on this?
We haven’t prioritized this feature yet, due to the low volume of requests for it. We are much more likely to integrate a more recent (and robust) version of JavaScript into Workflow, to supplement the old JScript/VBScript engine WIndows provides.
No, the plan is to rename the current JavaScript language option to JScript (which is more precise anyway) to remain completely backward-compatible, and then to add an actual JavaScript option with an engine that supports the latest ECMAScript specs.
@Phil - This is excellent news and we will certainly welcome the addition of a modern JavaScript engine. My developers are struggling to run anything via the current Run Script plugin. JavaScript features such as classes, components, arrow functions, promises… are simply not recognised. Unfortunately, we cannot go back to using Ecmascript 3 standard as our internal development guidelines forbid this.
We feel the Worklow is a very powerful tool and it has certainly helped us to improve and standardise our billing processes across our various branches; but at times we also feel it is lacking or is not fully compatible with modern web development. For instance NodeJS support was recently added but at the same time the Workflow hasn’t really introduced any scripting language such as Typescript, a language NodeJS and web developers like us heavily rely on for NodeJS development. As such we are having to develop externaly and execute our NodeJS and TypScript apps via the External Program. Meanwhile, the Connect Design tool continues to evolve and packs more modern web features with every new release, 64 bit support, html 5, CSS 3, Ecmascript 5…to say the least. For instance, we recently saw the addition of SCSS support in Designer which was another long awaited feature. Furthermore some general purpose functions we wrote in Designer aren’t reusable in Workflow!
Finally, we have seen a huge discrepancy between the metadata in Design and the metadata in Workflow !!! We are constantly having to workaround missing or incomplete features (for web development and publishing), which is obviously time consuming.
We love Connect and obviously appreciate the huge amount of work and careful thoughts that have been put into this fantastic product but have put investing in more site licenses on hold until we feel Workflow has caught up with the improvements in Designer.
We are pleased to hear a new JavaScript engine is just around the corner and are looking forward to seeing it.
Thank you for these detailed comments, I think you’ll be happy to know they are in line with our own assessment of the required improvements to Workflow over the next several releases.
Note however that even with a new JS engine, some of its newer features - like promises - will not make much sense in the context of a Workflow process whose very foundation relies on events and tasks being executed in a synchronous fashion. We do, however, have other plans to allow asynchronous execution and/or call-backs, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion.
So please be patient with Workflow just a bit longer, it will evolve significantly over the course of the next releases.
Thanks again for your comments, and feel free to add more suggestions, we are listening even though it may sometimes take a while before you see the effects in the software.