How to access the output returned by an Orchestration Activity

Overview

 This article describes how to use the Orchestration Databus to access the output returned by a powershell activity. 

How To

For this article, an example custom powershell activity that pings a host has been created. The input IP address is passed by a service catalog item, which in turn triggers the workflow with the custom activity.

In the Outputs section of the activity two output variables have been created, as seen in the following screenshot.

Add the Ping Server activity and a Run Script activity into a workflow. Inside the Run Script activity, access the Databus variables, using the method data.get(). The data.get() function receives an integer as its argument. The integer number should match the number used by the Databus to refer to the activity. In this case the number is 3, this number can be seen to the righthand side of the activity name.

In the screenshot above, the output is passed to a workflow.scratchpad variable which can be used in other parts of the workflow.

With the steps given above, data returned by an orchestration activity can used successfully in other parts of a workflow.