How to preserve the workflow state on closing a custom modal in Sitecore 8.1

Question

My Customer has a regulatory compliance requirement to add secondary authentication prior to any workflow approval, so the approach that I have taken is by defining a custom Action which opens a DialogForm and it handles the authentication part.

It works great, but there is one problem where the state of the workflow changes automatically to the next state when a modal is closed before a user is authenticated.

For example, if a workflow has 3 states (Draft -> Submit (If this has that authentication requirement, then the user has to get stuck in the same state until the user authenticates) -> Approve)

I know the existing out of the box Approve action is handling this scenario but I was not able to track the right dll to see the code. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Thanks, Gobinath I was able to implement the solution based on your sample code and I am adding the code for missing pieces like below

1. How to refresh the Sitecore item on ContentEditor without having to refresh the browser.

2. Having a new field to preserve the out of the box next state feature, I added a new field to the new template which inherited the Action template.

           public void Process(WorkflowPipelineArgs args)
           {
               Assert.ArgumentNotNull((object)args, nameof(args));
               Item workflowItem = args.DataItem;
   
               string nextStateId = args.CommandItem.Fields["Authentication Next State"]?.GetValue(true);
   
               NameValueCollection parameters = new NameValueCollection();
              //Add paramters here if needed any
   
               Context.ClientPage.Start(this, "Run", new ClientPipelineArgs() { Parameters = parameters });
           }
   
           private void Run(ClientPipelineArgs args)
           {
               if (args.IsPostBack)
               {
                   if (args.HasResult)
                   {
                       string isUserAuthenticated = args.Result?.ToLower();
   
                       if (isUserAuthenticated == "true")
                       {
                           string itemId = args.Parameters["workflowItemId"];
                           string nextStateId = args.Parameters["nextStateId"];
   
                           Item item = Global.ContentDatabase.GetItem(itemId);
                           string workflowNextState = Global.ContentDatabase.GetItem(nextStateId)?.DisplayName;
   
                           if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(workflowNextState))
                           {
   
                               WorkflowResult result = ChangeWorkflowState(item, workflowNextState);
   
                               if (result.Succeeded)
                               {
                                   string itemLang = args.Parameters["workflowItemLanguage"];
                                   string itemVersion = args.Parameters["workflowItemVersion"];
   
                                   //Refresh the item on content editor
                                   string load = $"item:load(id={itemId},language={itemLang},version={itemVersion})";
                                   Context.ClientPage.ClientResponse.Timer(load, 0);
                               }
                               else
                               {
                                   SheerResponse.Alert(result.Message);
                               }
                           }
                       }
                   }
               }
               else
               {
                   string controlUri = UIUtil.GetUri("control:AuthenticationDialog");
   
                   SheerResponse.ShowModalDialog(controlUri, true);
                   args.WaitForPostBack();
               }
           }
   

To set the result from the Modal

SheerResponse.SetDialogValue("add the result");