Setting a dependency property's default value at design time in a Windows Workflow Foundation Custom Activity

Question

Hi, I'm implementing a Custom Workflow and Activities to be reused in multiple projects and trying to get them to be as easy to use as possible. In this workflow I have a Property whose name is 'UserID' which I'd like to bind to a dependencyproperty in one of my activities. I can currently bind it at design time searching explicitly for the property each time I add one of these activities to the workflow, but I'd like for this activity to be binded automatically.

As far as i know (correct me if I'm wrong), to bind a dependency property at design time I need to specify a string of the form "Activity=NameOfWorkflow, Path=UserID" to the DefaultBindingProperty metadata tag, and I'd like the name of the workflow to be completed in some way. Any way of doing this?

Thanks

Answer 1

I finally managed to achieve this by attaching an ActivityToolboxItem to the Activity, and overriding a method in it that creates the instance shown in the designer. I used an ActivityBind object to bind the dependencyproperty to the workflow's property. To get the instance of the workflow, I just searched for an ancestor to my activity by calling act.Parent until the activity had no parent (and thus was the StateMachineWorkflowActivity itself)