Question

I need to add functionality to my WPF application (in C#) that allows users to create their own rules and execute an action from a list of pre-defined actions. An example of what I need is the “Rules And Alerts” feature of Outlook.

I’ve just been recently introduced to functional programming and one part of me thinks this might be a perfect place to implement that. Another part of me thinks that workflows may be the best approach but I’ve never worked with workflows outside of SharePoint.

So, I’m looking for guidance from those who may have experience implementing such functionality. In my opinion, it is not so difficult to create a script (or whatever it’s called), but the tricky part is parsing the script back into the designer.

Any other ideas will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It sounds like for what you want, a scripting engine or Windows Workflow would be waaaay overkill. Those become interesting when there are custom actions to be defined with a high degree of flexibility but if it’s really having normal users (without extensive training) select/customize a critera and then select/customize a pre-defined action, then I’d just mimic the Outlook approach you mentioned (also look at the “Conditional Formatting” feature in Excel)