Elsa Workflows, Orchard Harvest Online - This week in Orchard (02/06/2023)
Thank you, everyone, for taking part in Orchard Harvest Online, and thanks to the presenters for their great presentations! Check out our current post for a short summary of the conference; a demo about Elsa Workflows and many more!
Orchard Core updates
Admin Dashboard widgets are not scrollable when the content is long
Last week we mentioned several improvements regarding the Admin Dashboard and the Admin Dashboard widgets. And we have another improvement for this week too!
Currently, the Admin Dashboard widgets are set to hide any horizontal and vertical overflow. This works well when you can control the content of your widget based on specifying the best height/width of each widget.
Sometimes you may want to create a widget without being able to control the length. For example, recent contents/posts, most viewed contents, etc. All these examples of a widget with uncontrollable content. In that case, it does not make sense to hide the overflow content vertically. We can still hide the horizontal overflow and the widget since that is something each widget can design for. But the vertical overflow should be set to auto.
You can reproduce this behavior easily by creating a widget that lists the last 10 content items and making the size and the width of the widget 1 x 1. That's what you can see on the left side of the screen.
And as you can see, when setting the vertical overflow to auto, we get a scroll bar for the widgets when the content is larger than expected.
Fix the notifier cookie path
Let's say we have an Orchard Core site installed as an application under the default website in IIS. What this means is that we access the site with the following URL: https://localhost/orchard. The problem is that the notifier cookie uses the tenant prefix as the cookie path. For example:
- For the default tenant, https://localhost/orchard, the notifier cookie path is set to / when it should be set to /orchard.
- For another tenant, let's call it tenantA at https://localhost/orchard/tenantA, the notifier cookie path is set to /tenantA when it should be set to /orchard/tenantA.
Technically, scenario 1 still works, since cookies with a path of / can still be seen by /orchard. Even though the path isn't exactly what it should be, the notification still appears.
The problem is in scenario 2, since the cookie path is being set to /tenantA but /orchard/tenantA can't see that cookie, and the notification doesn't appear. After applying this fix, the notification works for tenantA using /orchard/tenantA.
Demos
Elsa Workflows
Elsa Core is a workflow library that enables workflow execution in any .NET Core application. Workflows can be defined using code and using the visual workflow designer. We mention Else here because Elsa is an innovative workflow engine derived from Orchard Core's Workflows module. It was born from a requirement of a project where they didn't want to base it on Orchard Core, but they did want to have Workflows. So, the goal here was to create a reusable designer that you can host/use in your own dashboard application.
In this demo, Sipke Schoorstra, one of the main contributors of Elsa shows you everything that you need to know about Elsa Workflows. Head to YouTube for this exciting demo!
News from the community
Orchard Harvest Online
We had the first online Orchard Harvest last Wednesday, and it was so great to see that we had 188 sign-ups for the conference! It was an excellent opportunity to share knowledge, talk about development plans and ideas, and foremost, meet the rest of the worldwide community. The conference was started by a Keynote from Sébastien Ros and followed by a talk from Andrii Chebukin about how you can use Orchard Core Framework for multi-tenancy apps. After that, Zoltán Lehóczky showed us how you can use open-source tools in the following areas: CI builds, static code analysis, unit and UI testing, and telemetry collection. And just before the breakout sessions, you can see a great session by Peyton McManus about why they selected Orchard for their new application. How his team has leveraged Orchard to rebuild and re-imagine the application, and how they will continue to leverage Orchard for their set of features.
In the breakout sessions, the attendees had a chance to meet the speakers and other community members. Each speaker had a breakout room where the attendees asked questions and discussed the topic of their talk, or anything else Orchard Core related.
After the break, we could see a talk from Hisham Bin Ateya about exploring different parts of localization stuff in Orchard Core. After that, Dávid El-Saig described the Orchard Core Commerce project's state and showed the current features. And the last talk was from Sipke Schoorstra where he provided an overview of Elsa Workflows' features, compared it to Orchard Core Workflows, and discussed integration possibilities.
And of course, we recorded every session, which means they will be available on YouTube soon! Don't forget to follow our This week in Orchard newsletter to be informed about the recordings!
That was a blast! Thank you everyone for taking part and thanks to the presenters for their great presentations!
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