In the next ten to fifteen minutes I will show you how to interact with the API.
In this example, the interaction occur from within a native windows desktop application.
At the end you will be able to view and execute workflow tasks created from your K2 workflow(s). I bet you don’t have much time, so let’s move on!

First of all, you will need the URL to your K2 Appit environment. Follow the steps below in order to easily retrieve this piece of information.
> Navigate to the site content page of your SharePoint site.
> Click the K2 Appit for SharePoint app.
> Under the Administration section, look for Registration Wizard

Besides, we also need the URL of your O365 tenant environment. Compared to the previous procedure, this URL is less hard to find. Just navigate to one of your SharePoint sites, and copy the URL from the address bar in your browser.
E.g.: https://my-domain.sharepoint.com

In the next step we will create an Azure Active Directory application which is needed for the authentication process.
Indeed, calling the K2 Appit API does require authentication! This means it’s safe and secure!
I will not go into full details on how to setup the AAD app, as it is very well explained on msdn.
Make sure however you register a native client application and not a web application.

If you didn’t encounter any problems so far, you should have obtained a similar configuration file in your project. Please keep in mind that there are 2 additional settings at the bottom of the configuration file. Since t hey are always the same, you can directly add them to the configuration file as well.

And now, finally, the moment you have been waiting for? Let’s dive into the code!
Make sure you have referenced the Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory nuget package. This reference contains the objects and methods needed to get you authenticated.

In order to make a call to the K2 Appit API, we first need an authentication token.
Below a HttpClient instance is built, which will contain a valid authentication token embedded in it’s headers.

From now on you can use this httpClient instance to go and call the K2 Appit API.
Retrieving tasks – called work list items in K2 – can be done as shown below

It is possible to execute your task(s) via this client application as well.
How this is done, including some additional information, can be found in the fully working sample project.

To round things up, I’d like to recommend a really nice – yet free! – tool.
It really make life easier if you’re frequently working with API calls and JSON strings.
It’s called Json2CSharp and it lets you convert any JSON string into a c# class. Who likes working with those damn JObjects anyway?

Thomas Gielissen

Cloud Solution Developer @ Spikes

K2 Appit is to K2 Blackpearl what SharePoint Online is to SharePoint 2013

Simply put, Appit is a cloud-product allowing you to build complex workflow and forms applications on SharePoint, all without a single line of code.

In case you are familiar with K2’s flagship product K2 Blackpearl you might have already encountered the following acronym which captures the essence of K2’s activities and as such also applies to Appit; K2 FAST FWD:

• Fast Forms
• Fast Workflow
• Fast Data

K2’s products allows you to quickly build Forms, integrating Data from a wide variety of back-end systems and use them in complex Workflows even if you might not necessarily be familiar with any programming languages. So you want to extend your SharePoint list forms to also show contact information stored in Microsoft Dynamics CRM? No problem! You want to start an approval workflow when your account manager uploads a contract revision to a SharePoint document library and automatically update your business partner’s contract status in SAP after the revision has been approved? No problem! Or perhaps you want to allow end-users to request new SharePoint sites and create these sites automatically, all without writing a single line of code, while also notifying the user’s manager? You guessed it… No problem! Obviously this isn’t the full extent of what K2 Appit is capable of so I’ll spend some time trying to give you a brief – and most likely far from complete – overview of what it can mean for your corporation or that of your customer.

• It allows you to design reusable Forms which, without any extra effort, are compatible with your desktop as well as your tablet and/or smartphone. And while on the topic of device compatibility: did I mention that tasks generated by workflows can be actioned on your mobile device even when your device is not connected to a network? K2’s workflow engine will store your decisions and automatically sync them when connectivity is restored. So why not approve some holiday requests while in between meetings or waiting for the train?
• You can create complex Workflows coupled with insightful reports so you can find out which steps in the process take up most of the time and could potentially be streamlined.
• K2 Appit is able to integrate Data stored in a wide variety of back-end systems, with out-of-the-box connectivity to SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Microsoft CRM Online, Azure SQL, SQL Server and ALL systems that allow communication via web services: a feature which every self-respecting software system should include anyway

So why am I – and my fellow developers with me – this excited about the product if K2 Blackpearl, its on-premise counterpart already covered most –  if not all –  of the functionality K2 Appit provides? There are many reasons, but I’ll try to summarize them into two main categories: intellectual and commercial. From an intellectual perspective their choice of abandoning the one-time license cost in favor of a monthly subscription fee significantly lowers the barrier for businesses to try out the product and get a taste of its functionality before fully committing their resources to it. This encourages the fine folks at K2 to convince these users by churning out even more great features and really pushes them to polish the user experience to new heights. Combine this with the shorter release cycles that are typically associated with cloud products and it’s clear to see that we as designer/developers will always have plenty of new tools to look forward to, which will be in our hands faster than ever, all wrapped in a nice and tidy product that is a pleasure to work with – tl;dr: Life is good!

From a commercial point of view it allows us to offer our services to a wider array of customers:

• Customers that are aware of the advantages of cloud based solutions but also of the risks associated with switching technologies and are looking for an experienced partner to help them make the transition so they can focus on their core business.
• Small and medium businesses that had previously turned aside K2 Blackpearl because of its flat license cost who might want to revisit that decision in favor of K2 Appit’s pay-per-user business model.

Needless to say this market is rapidly expanding, which was proven again last month when Microsoft announced its cloud-based revenue had doubled for the fourth consecutive quarter. It’s hard to imagine that Charles Darwin had the IT landscape of the 21^st century in mind when he first used the phrase “survival of the fittest” but he couldn’t have been more right: businesses either evolve or they perish. And like the first birds taking to the sky must have thought: There is a whole new world up there for us to explore.

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