Correlation in WF 4 on InstanceId Workflow

Question

On Windows Workflow Foundation under .NET 4.0, is there a way to map InstanceId-based operations (GUIDs) to a long, continuous workflow?

For instance:

• Operation 1 creates an instance of the workflow, returns the identifier of the workflow instance to the client
• The client may later query the InstanceStore database to retrieve the InstanceId instance from the instances.
• The client invokes operation 2 and passes the InstanceId for content-based correlation

I can do all this if I have a client creating and passing a GUID for the first operation, use this value in the content correlation, and then increase this value when saving. This seems redundant, however, since the workflow is already creating a GUID for the instance.

Answer 1

Create an action to extract the workflow instance ID from the passed context and return it from the SendReply action. Then use the CorrelationInitializer in SendReply to configure query correlation.