Carol(MissMiis) has created a really nice activity for executing PowerShell scripts, both local and remote and it opens up for all kinds of possibilities! Check it out!

http://www.wapshere.com/missmiis/powershell-activity

A couple of months ago Joe Zamora (the CShark) was trying to solve the mysteries around the EnumerateResourcesActivity, a great activity that you could use from your own custom activities/workflows but not from the FIM workflow designer, read Joe’s post here. After a lot of work, some help from Nima in the product team and a couple of not that useful tips from me Joe got it working. See the forum post where me and Joe was trying to accomplish this here.

The EnumerateResourcesActivity is the only activity that could search for and return resources in FIM and it does so simply by you giving it an XPath query. It’s a really nice activity except it’s got limitations in that it can only contain a single child activity (actually not strange at all, the same goes for the ReplicatorActivity) and it has a got a designer that doesn’t allow for adding the child activity declaratively so you’re forced to add the single child using code. The EnumerateResourcesActivity work pretty much as the ReplicatorActivity in that it iterates bunch of values only in the case of the EnumerateResourcesActivity it finds the values (resources) before iterating them. An important aspect of workflow crafting is that an activity can’t be executed twice and that is handled by the EnumerateResourcesActivity by creating duplicates of the child activity objects (and descendant objects of the child activity) for each iteration before the iteration is started therefore you can’t use the original activity object references for getting activities within the iterations.

Joe used a CodeActivity as the single child but the solution I’m going to show you will use a SequenceActivity instead making it possible to add more than one single activity because you will probably want to do work suited for other activities like add a user to the group you have found or something like that.

I won’t go through all the stuff around activity crafting, for this you’ll have to turn to the Windows Workflow Foundation developer center , the Forefront Identity Manager 2010 Developer Reference or maybe the oracle scrapheap's named Google and Bing. First of all we need some code in the designer part of our custom Activity class (A custom activity is usually created from two partial classes when you create it in Visual Studio). In the InitializeComponent method I create a EnumerateResourcesActivity, add a SequenceActivity to it and to the SequenceActivity I add a CodeActivity but I leave for you to create more child activities to the SequenceActivity after the CodeActivity. Finally I add the EnumerateResourcesActivity to the custom activity I’m currently creating:

private void InitializeComponent()
{
    this.CanModifyActivities = true;

    // codeActivity
    this.codeActivity = new CodeActivity();
    this.codeActivity.ExecuteCode += new System.EventHandler(this.codeActivity_ExecuteCode);

    // sequenceActivity
    this.sequenceActivity = new SequenceActivity();
    this.sequenceActivity.Activities.Add(this.codeActivity);

    // enumResourcesActivity 
    this.enumResourcesActivity = new Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Workflow.Activities.EnumerateResourcesActivity();
    this.enumResourcesActivity.PageSize = 100;
    this.enumResourcesActivity.XPathFilter = "/Person";
    this.enumResourcesActivity.Activities.Add(this.sequenceActivity);
            
    // MyCustomActivity
    this.Activities.Add(this.enumResourcesActivity);
    this.Name = "MyCustomActivity";

    this.CanModifyActivities = false;
}

Did you notice the XPathFilter property of the EnumerateResourcesActivity that I’ve set to return all person objects? You might think it’s strange that I add a CodeActivity as the only child of the SequenceActivity but I use this for getting the resource for the current iteration and it also gives a method that you could use for assigning values to siblings further down the execution chain from the CodeActivity that I leave up to you to add.

Here’s how I extract the value from the EnumerateResourcesActivity:

void codeActivity_ExecuteCode(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    SequenceActivity s = (SequenceActivity)((CodeActivity)sender).Parent;
    ResourceType resource = EnumerateResourcesActivity.GetCurrentIterationItem(s) as ResourceType;

    // Perform initialization of any sibling activities here but remember you must reference
    // them as I’ve done above with the SequenceActivity 
    // and a good way of doing it could be for example...
    // UpdateResourceActivity u = s.Activities.OfType<UpdateResourceActivity>().First();
    // or other generic “queries”.
}

First of all we need to get the SequenceActivity of the current iteration and since we know it’s the parent of the CodeActivity we could get the Parent property object of the current CodeActivity object instance that we’ve got from the sender parameter. Then we call the static GetCurrentIterationItem method passing in the SequenceActivity object instance and this should return the resource for the current iteration.

Next I leave up to you to use the values of the found resources to do whatever you wish and that could be for example update the resources found, delete the resources found or maybe create new resources from whatever values the found resources contain.

I got a comment from Joe Stepongzi today and he didn’t like my Normalize Diacritic Characters Activity that is a part of my Cortego ILM 2 Workflow Activity Library:

The use of the Normalize Diacritic Characters Activity is to normalize characters with different kinds of diacritics into pure characters or how I should define it? The main reason I've created this activity is that I'm from Sweden and must handle "ÅÄÖ" but I'm also working for a company that has a lot of employees in the eastern European countries and that is a nightmare when trying to create for example email addresses. This could be hard to understand for Britain’s and Americans since English is a language where diacritics are sparsely used and this wouldn't have been a problem if the Americans would have understood from the beginning there are other languages than English and a need for other standards than ASCII. Here are a couple of examples of what could be accomplished (I do hope your browser supports Unicode otherwise you'll probably see a lot of boxes):

• å –> a (Used in Scandinavian languages more)
• Å –> A (Capital å)
• Ӑ –> A (Cyrillic A with breve more)
• ѓ –> г (Cyrillic Gje more)
• Ё –> E (Cyrillic Yo more)
• ペ -> ヘ (Katakana and Hiragana (Japanese) letter He, note how the normalization removes the Handakuten.) 

As you see the activity is only normalizing diacritics by removing any Unicode spacing marks and this is how it works code wise using the System.Globalization namespace for normalization of diacritics:

First of all the input string is normalized into Form D that decomposes characters in this way:

• å –> a + Ring
• Ё –> E + Umlaut
• æ –> a + e (Used in Danish, Norwegian and old English more)
• 각 –>  ᄀ + ᅡ+ ᆨ (Hangul letter used in Korea)

Then all characters defined as Unicode spacing marks are removed and in the example above the ring and the dots (umlaut) are removed. Finally the remaining string is normalized into Form C, composing characters back, for example:

• a -> a (The ring is already removed)
• E -> E (The umlaut is already removed)
• a + e –> æ (Note: if the original input would have been “ae” it would not become “æ”)
• ᄀ + ᅡ + ᆨ –> 각

Normalizing a eastern European name like "Lāčkāja Lapiņš" would end up as "Lackaja Lapins" and a typical Swedish name like "Åsa Öberg" would end up as "Asa Oberg", a lot easier to handle for creating different kind of names and also widely accepted in the countries where diacritic characters are used.

As you can see, characters are not as Joe thought changed into multiple characters but he do have a point in that for example email addresses should be handled at the source and not in ILM2/FIM2010... But if you would like accounts and mailboxes to be automatically created from for example an HR system, one of the best practices of Identity Management... You might be forced to create the email addresses and other system names following your naming standards unless you trust your HR personnel having full control over all existing email addresses and names. It’s up to you to make sure input characters are valid but by using this activity you don’t have to worry about macrons, curls, dots, accents and so on but as you can see the 각 and æ characters is not changed or removed so they would still a be problem when creating email addresses.

A solution to make sure you get valid strings after normalization could be to use my Regex Replace Activity to remove or replace any remaining characters that isn’t valid in the context you’re using it. In order to get unique names or email addresses you could use my Unique Name Activity. Both these activities is contained in the Cortego ILM 2 Workflow Activity Library. The pattern "[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]" could be used in the Regex Replace Activity to find and remove or replace all characters that is not within a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and whitespace characters.  

If you would like to know more about Unicode Normalization this is a great guide: Unicode Normalization Forms. If you would like to know how different characters from different scripts including Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, Thai, Katakana, and so on are composed/decomposed you could have a look at these Normalization Charts. A description of different kinds of diacritics could be found at Diacritic - Wikipedia.

Finally, do you trust your HR personnel or do you have a Catbert at your company? 

The RegexReplaceActivity that is introduced in the Cortego ILM 2 Workflow Activity Library is using the Regex class of System.Text.RegularExpressions namespace and by using the Replacement parameter of the Replace function we could actually do some real cool stuff. The Replacement parameter of the Replace function is translated into the Replacement property of the RegexReplaceActivity and there is no requirement the Replacement parameter must contain a plain text, it could in fact contain a replacement pattern as well and here is an example taken from the MSDN - Regular Expressions Examples used to change the format of dates. Please notice it's just an example, you're the one that must know how actual values are formatted and I don't know if using the EmployeeEndDate attribute with this example is appropriate.

Replace dates of the form mm/dd/yy with dates of the form dd-mm-yy.

Input value (from Expression): 04/30/09 or 04/30/2009 (there's a 2 to 4 characters quantifier for year in the Regex Pattern)
RegEx Pattern: \b(?<month>\d{1,2})/(?<day>\d{1,2})/(?<year>\d{2,4})\b
Replacement: ${day}-${month}-${year} 

  

Output value (Destination expression): 30-04-09 or 30-04-2009 – isn’t that cool???
What happens is that the input data is captured into variables that are then used to format a new value.

Realize what you could do with this, you could in fact simply extract parts from or format input data to what ever you like!
A good source for more info about regular Expressions is .NET Framework Regular Expressions.