RESTful Workflow Service Endpoints in WF4 / WCF

Question

Folks, I'm building a pretty standard workflow that I want exposed via a WCF endpoint - I'm using the "WCF Service Application" project template and I've got a .xamlx service. This is a very simple document interchange workflow service - I want consumers to POST me a blob of XML as the body of an HTTP post (with HTTP headers containing authentication tokens). In response, these consumers will get a blob of XML containing the reply. 2 goals for me using REST/POX here are the document/message-based nature of the interaction AND I want to make client development easy for non-.NET environments (especially limited environments like Silverlight and iPhone).

I don't really see how to make this possible using out of the box features (unless I'm missing something). Does anybody know how to create a RESTful (or even REST-ish, I'm not picky) endpoint for a WF4 service-hosted workflow? Any info leading in the right direction here would be great.

Answer 1

There are no out of the box activities that will allow you to use REST with WF, the Receice is pure SOAP.

You can either build a custom REST Receive activity and use that with your workflow. Depending on your needs this is going to be quite a handful to a lot of work. The easy option is use use a standard REST WCF endpoint and convert the REST data to SOAP, pass rhe request on to the workflow, and do the reverse on the result message.