12 Days of Code M-Files Development Challenge

Have you been looking to start building M-Files customizations, or to hone your skills? Have some free time over the festive period? If so then why not take a look at our 12 Days of Code M-Files Development Challenge!

The purpose of this is to have a little fun and to learn some new skills. All levels are encouraged to participate.

Each day we will release a small task that you will be asked to implement using M-Files. Most of these tasks are aimed at the Vault Application Framework, and all require you to write some C#. If you've not done some of these things before then each task should take you around an hour. If you've got lots of experience then you will obviously do them quickly, but we have some ideas for how you might want to extend the task a little.

We will be running the challenge between the 13th and 24th December. This allows you to "complete" the challenge before the typical holiday season starts. Remember: there's no obligation to get the challenges done on the day that they're released, so pop back whenever you have time to do another one.

Rules

• You can use any appropriate technology, including external libraries. It's your code; build it as you would normally (or would like to normally!).
• If you would like to make your code available to everyone then feel free to host it on GitHub or similar. If you would like to keep your code to yourself then that is fine as well.
• If you don't have any development experience with M-Files then start with the Developer Portal. We'll give you guidance to get started on each day.
• If you do have M-Files development experience then take this opportunity to try out new things. Want to unit test approaches? Go for it. Want to try out the VAF Extensions library? Awesome!
• Keep things positive and constructive. Everyone's code style and concerns are different; acknowledge and accept those.
• Some of the M-Files team will be posting example solutions each day. If you'd like us to see what you've built then we'll monitor LinkedIn and Twitter for the hashtag #MFiles12DaysOfCode, or post on the M-Files Developer Community!
• There are no points or prizes, unfortunately.

Getting Started

To take part in the challenge you will need a few things set up:

1. You will need the latest version of M-Files installed on your computer. You can download the 30-day trial from our website if you need it.
2. You will need Visual Studio 2019 or 2022 installed (the free community edition is fine, if you qualify). You will also need the M-Files Visual Studio Template Package installed.
   1. Note: If you are using Visual Studio 2022 then you may also need to install the .NET 4.5.2 developer pack so that you can create .NET 4.5 applications.
3. You will need to have the 12 Days of Code vault configured. We will use this for the challenges.

Challenges will be released once per day, in the evening. You can choose to undertake each challenge the day it's released, or at any time over the festive period.

Tasks

Make sure that you have all your prerequisites set up: set up your M-Files server, restore the challenge vault, and install/configure Visual Studio. Do this before the challenge begins!

1. 13th December: Start off simple: Use the Vault Application Framework 2.3 Visual Studio template to create a new VAF 2.3 application.
   1. Open the PowerShell file and change the vault name to install to. Build the application in debug mode and check the Visual Studio "Output" window to check that your application was installed to the vault with no errors.
   2. Optional: Use nuget to add a reference to the VAF Extensions library and change the VaultApplication base class to MFiles.VAF.Extensions.ConfigurableVaultApplicationBase<Configuration>.
   3. Open the appdef.xml file and update the name, version, publisher, and other information that you would like to set. Also set the Multi-Server-Mode compatible flag to true. Rebuild and check that the changes are shown in the M-Files Admin software.
2. 14th December: Create a shared public link when a document reaches the "Shared" state in the "Share link" workflow. Populate another property with the created link.
   1. Make sure that the object audit trail isn't affected by your code!
   2. Tip: you can only create a shared link to a checked-in version of a file; "env.ObjVer" will not be checked in. Instead load the latest not-checked-in version of the object using GetLatestObjectVersionAndProperties and setting "allowCheckedOut" to false.
   3. Tip: by default M-Files does not allow version-specific file sharing. When setting the FileVer for the link you will typically need to set the version number to -1.
   4. Suggested extension: set the expiry date of the link to be based on another date property.
   5. Suggested extension: send an email to someone and include the public link to the document.
3. 15th December: Integrate a logging framework of your choice (NLog or Serilog may be good options) so that you can better control logging. Add appropriate logging to anything you've done, and remember to use it for the next days' work!
   1. Suggested extension: expose the configuration for your logging framework in the M-Files Admin, allowing users to turn on and off logging, or alter the logging levels.
   2. Suggested extension: expose the current configuration in a VAF dashboard.
4. 16th December: Create an asynchronous operation (task queue!) that runs once per day. The process should request data from this github dataset and create objects in the vault for the items that are returned.
   1. Hint: .NET 4.5 does not support TLS 1.2 out of the box; you will need to set the ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol in the VaultApplication constructor: System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Tls11 | SecurityProtocolType.Tls12;
   2. Hint: the user agent header is required to be set to request data from this API: webClient.Headers.Add("User-Agent", "Vault application")
   3. Use the ID as a unique identifier.
   4. Use the file name as the object name.
   5. Choose what data to pull through into objects; you may just choose to add the object's JSON into the description property.
   6. You may want to use the VAF Extensions for this!
   7. Consider what the appropriate transaction mode is for this operation.
   8. Suggested extension: deal with IDs that have already been imported.
   9. Suggested extension: enable the user to run the process on demand.
   10. Suggested extension: allow the user to customise the schedule that this runs on.
5. 17th December: When a project moves into the "Project Agreed" state, generate a contract and project plan from the templates in the vault.
   1. Suggested extension: make this configurable! Allow administrators to configure which documents should be generated when an object matches some conditions.
6. 18th December: Stop a project being moved into the "Active" state if it does not have a signed contract. You can use a state action, state post condition, state pre-condition, or event handler, as appropriate.
   1. Suggested extension: make this configurable! Allow administrators to configure what logic should be used to stop an object entering different workflow states.
7. 19th December: VAF dashboards - shown when the user selects your application within the M-Files Admin configuration area - are great places to show information about your application and its status.
   1. Create a custom dashboard that shows information about the application, your/your-company's contact details, and maybe even a logo or selfie.
   2. Optional: expose some basic statistics from the vault - how many invoices are not yet approved? How many projects are active right now?
8. 20th December: When an Invoice moves into the "Pending upload to finance" state, the PDF should be written to disk along with an XML file containing basic information such as the associated Purchase Order number, then the object moved to the next workflow state. This should be done as an asynchronous operation (task queues!).
   1. Suggested extension: design a process for handling that the Invoice may be checked out so cannot be updated by the task processor.
9. 21st December: When an employee leaves the business it is important that all of the contracts that they were managing are assigned to someone else. When a user is marked as having left the company, find all documents where the "Contract Owner" is the leaving user, and change the owner to their "Successor". Use the "Former employee" workflow state a trigger for this process.
   1. Test this by marking Bob T Builder as having left, with his contracts now owned by Pilchard T Cat.
   2. This should be implemented as an asynchronous operation.
   3. Consider what the transaction mode should be for this operation.
   4. Suggested extension: Consider the performance impact of there being thousands of contracts owned by one person; use CheckOutMultipleObjects/SetPropertiesOfMultipleObjects/CheckInMultipleObjects to instead work with batches of objects.
   5. Suggested extension: decide on a reasonable process for handling situations where batches (or single objects) cannot be updated.
10. 22nd December: Add licensing to your application. You can choose how the application should operate if the licence is missing or expired.
11. 23rd December: Build an intelligence service that can read the date that this photo was taken, as well as the GPS co-ordinates, and provide them as metadata suggestions. You might use this C# library (https://www.nuget.org/packages/MetadataExtractor/) to extract the EXIF data.
    1. Tip: EXIF GPS data is held differently to the standard decimal latitude/longitude that you may have seen. Read this to convert between the two.
    2. Suggested extension: place the image into a workflow and use a state action and the COM API to read the suggestions and automatically apply them.
12. 24th December: Create a new project using the "Custom External Object Type Data Source" Visual Studio template. Implement a data source using the same data as you did on day #4. Install and configure this data source.
    1. Tip: if using the same object type, disable your other application to stop the two trying to both work on the same objects.
    2. Consider the pros and cons of these two approaches; which do you feel you would use more, and why?