How can I reverse engineer an existing workflow in moss

Question

I know that we can reverse engineers sites definitions and other sharepoint moss entities but can we take a workflow that has been created via the UI and reverse engineer it to a vs.net based workflow?

Answer 1

Yes.

Each of the OOTB workflows in MOSS are acctually what you call "vs.net based workflows".

IE - the OOTB workflows are provisioned via features, which you can find the manifests for in 12Hive/Templates/Features.

Find the feature.xml for the workflow you want to reverse engineer and it will point you to the dll. You can use Reflector to then see inside the assembly.

On top of the VS workflow, all the OOTB workflows add .aspx initiation forms to the workflow. These forms collect the parameters (IE approver's email) that get passed into the workflow.

This should get you pretty far down your path.