I've been having this issue and been looking for a solution to no avail.
Situation A:
We have a SharePoint 2010 site which contains a list that has a SharePoint Designer workflow. Now everything seems to be working fine, the workflow runs upon item creation and so on, then after quite some time with no one actually editing anything, the workflow just stopped working, no status in the workflow column as well, just suddenly no workflow activities happening in that list, anyone encountered this/knows a solution for this?
Situation B:
We have a SharePoint 2010 site, same as above, we have a list that has a SharePoint designer workflow attached to it. Now this workflow intermittently stops, just suddenly doesn't work upon item creation, no status in workflow columns as well. What happens is that we tried to edit the item and save it again multiple times before it runs. Any idea what's happening?
EDIT: As per checking, I can manually start the workflow.
Sometimes the Workflow Settings can revert to "No New Instances" when you deploy changes to a workflow. You might want to check that.
Otherwise, it doesn't sound like you have a DelayActivity, but it's historically been a place where workflows can hang because of a bug worked around in this blog:
http://the-simple-programmer.blogspot.com/2012/10/sharepoint-workflow-delay-activity.html
You basically have to run:
stsadm -o setproperty -pn job-workflow -pv "Every 5 minutes between 0 and 59" -url http://yoursite
Check your workflow history list. you may get clear picture of what stoping your workflow.
I doubt that this is the reason, but is there a chance that somebody has disabled the Workflows features from the Site settings
Related
We are having our Sharepoint workflow automattically canceling?? Every once in awhile this would happened. This is the 3rd time out of 20 infopath forms. I am not sure what is causing this and am not sure how to troubleshoot this eiether. It doesnt happend when the workflow starts but rather in the middle of the process which is a lenghty workflow with several steps.
no messages I can see. It just sAYS workflow is canceled. I even tried to run a workflow report and it says report has no data.
I do not see anything in the server logs ?????
now we discovered 2 more workflows that were mysteriously canceled in a another library. it seems sporadic.
these are web forms
I found this
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2496152
but mine are not canceling immediately and its only on a hand full not all
I think I am going to recreate the workflows. I think something could have got broken in the workflow schema b/c I tried to reuse a list workflow with a newly created form library. It seemed to work for awhile though.
I sort of opened the xml file and changed the list ID and imported it into the worklfow folder with SPDes
I notice they are canceling in the middle of the parrallel Block where multiple tasks (collect data from a user) are running at the same time on all 6 canceled workflows
Any experiences out there? Thanks
It could be worth checking what is written in ULS logs (c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\logs). You will find quite a lot of information there, search for the exact hour/minute/second when it happened.
In my case, I was using a column who’s value would change as soon as the workflow condition was met, thus cancelling itself. So check to make sure your columns are not automatically updated based on another column at the same time the workflow is running.
The SharePoint install is a SP2010 install on a 2008 R2 server. Everything is fully patched. I am running the SP Designer on the SharePoint Server directly.
I have a workflow which is intended to send an email when a new document is created in a custom list. I have deliberately kept the workflow very simple in order to illustrate this problem.
After creating this single step workflow in SP Designer, I click "Check for Errors" and SP Designer reports "The workflow contains no errors".
I then click "Publish" but the Workflow Error dialog is displayed with the message
Errors were found when compiling the workflow. The workflow files
were saved but cannot be run.
Clicking the advanced button reveals more information:
Could not publish the workflow because the workflow configuration file
contains errors
Any suggestions gratefully received
I'll share what fixed it for me - deactivating all workflow features at the site collection level (that is, Workflows, Three-state workflow, Publishing Approval Workflow) and then reactivating the features. I was then able to publish my workflow. This post helped, not sure whether this only works for 365 though, but it's sure worth trying first if you are considering a reinstall.
after googling for quite some time, i think it's an authentication issue. How is your SharePoint set up? Do you use HTTPS for authentication? If so check out this article.
I know this error message from sharepoint. I got this by dealing with multiple lookup fields refering to other lists. Even when I check the worfklow for errors SharePoint says that its all fine but i can't publish it at all.
Try to build a new Test-Site on your Site Collection. Build a Custom Document Library, leave it standard and then set up a new simple workflow just sending a mail.
Fill out the needed fields in mail only using simple values. Send to your mailadress, simple mail subject and simple mail body.
Set the workflow to run only manually.
Try to publish the workflow.
When this is working, then compair to your existing workflow and change your values by trail and error.
After doing a clean install of the OS and SharePoint, workflows are working flawlessly. I can only conclude that the problems were caused by left over registry settings from MOSS 2007. Thanks for the suggestions that people made.
This could also happens if you chage the URL of the web application, all you have do is click the Design button from the library itself.
when changinf the URL from http://server/Site to example: http://server.xx1.net/site, and you try to publish it tries the old url.
what helped in my situation is changing from start workflow automatically to manually.some times answers for critical situation is very easy. hope it helps, many thanks
I ran into this problem and after digging for days and folks suggesting to rebuild the servers, disabling and re-enabling site features, remove previous workflow versions, etc. and trying everything except rebuilding the servers (not practical for clients production environment). I decided to try some tests and found that this issue was only happening on one particular list no matter how simple or complex the workflow was... And when I would check the box for start automatically on item create (or when item changed) it would fail to publish and give the error above, but if I published it with just manually start worked fine. Finally after deleting views and some more testing, I discovered that there was over 240+ columns in this list (I did not create it...) and 50+ workflows set to run on create... Thankfully I have a test environment I built out for the client so I sync'd the Site Collection database back to test environment from Production re-ran my tests and got same error... So what resolved the problem and what was the ultimate cause of the problem, there was to many columns defined in the list and I had to delete several columns to publish the workflow in the test environment. This actually issue translates into the there is a limit in SQL Server on how much data the list can store each type of column takes up so much space read more about it here:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787(v=office.15).aspx#Column
So what I did in production was worked with my client to determine how to break up the list into multiple lists and have relationships between them, thus moving some of the columns and data to another list (Think database/list normalization)... I hope this solution helps someone.
OK, this is a first. I created a workflow for a list in sharepoint designer, its a basic if\else 1 step workflow, if an items been created or modified, it sends an email. After a few revisions (make a change, publish, test, repeat...) a weird issue started, Im now getting several copies of the same email sent to me. Not 2 or 3, but hundreds. After about 20 minutes, they seemed to have slowed down, but Im concerned because I have no clue why they started in the first place.
Were running WSS 3.0, and Im using Sharepoint Designer 2007 SP1. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Did you create an endless loop by any chance?
That is: Is your Workflow set to execute when an item is modified, and does the workflow modify the item?
Prior to SharePoint 2007 SP2, this will generate an infinite loop:
Workflow starts because the item is modified
Workflow modifies the item
Because the item was modified, another workflow will start
The other workflow modifies the item again
Because the item was modified, yet another workflow will start
Repeat until server crashes
In SharePoint 2007 SP2 this was changed and recursive workflows are forbidden now, but it looks like exactly that is happening with your workflow.
The reason it slows down after a while is possibly because the SharePoint or Mail server is starting to get overloaded.
Which version of WSS 3.0 are you running? Check in Central Administration -> Operations -> Servers in Farm and verify against this table. SP2 is version 12.0.0.6421, any lower version is vulnerable against the infinite workflow loop.
Good Morning,
I'm using SharePoint Designer 2007 to create a workflow for a MOSS site I have created.
What I'm looking to do is have the workflow send out an email if a document in the library hasn't been modified for the past 30 days (and it's Status field is not set as "Closed"), but I'm stumped as to how I can do this.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
You could try using the "Pause for duration" action (under "Core Actions" when you are adding an action to your SPD workflow).
However, I've worked on something that had a similar requirement and we decided that workflow was not the best option. We have a console application that is scheduled to run everyday and queries the list for "old" items. If it finds any old items, then it sends out an email to the user.
We are using an infopath form that when submitted is supposed to fire off a custom .NET workflow. Basically, the information within the form is used to create a new sharepoint site. What I am seeing happen is that the first time the workflow runs (which is automatic after the form is submitted), the workflow errors out. When I run the workflow manually immediately after it fails, the workflow runs fine.
this.workflowProperties.Item["Client Name"]
I've debugged the issue down to the above line where workflowProperties is of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow.SPWorkflowActivationProperties. The first time the workflow runs, the property listed above (and all others) are null. The second time it is run the client name property is as it should be (populated from the infopath form).
Another important piece of information is that this workflow was working fine for over a year and suddenly started not working correctly a few weeks ago for no particular reason. We were having some permissions issues the past month but I cannot see how that could be related to the workflow issue. The user I am logged in as is a site collection administrator. I use the same user to kick the workflow off manually (which succeeds). I do not think that the workflow runs as the user that is logged in though (when it is run automatically on form submission).
Another interesting wrinkle to the whole situation: there are a total of 3 custom workflows that the application uses. 2 were made in visual studio - one of these works fine and other is displaying the behavior described above. The last was made in sharepoint designer and is failing.
I'm willing to try just about anything at this point. I am on a dev server (which displays the exact symptoms as production) so I can try just about anything.
I'm guessing this has to do with the workflow being fired asynchronously from the commit operation that sets the fields values. Can you try and fetch the item explictly from the list instead of using the Item from the workflow properties. something like the following:
SPListItem l_item =
workflowProperties.Item.List.Items.GetItemById(
workflowProperties.Item.Id
);
i'm not certain, but it may be worth a try.
The other thing to keep in mind is the SPContext.Current object will be null if being called from an EventReceiver, but will be valid if called manually. It doesn't sound like this is the issue, but its something to be aware of nonetheless.
If the InfoPath forms are submitted from a Vista or Win 7 machine, you might face this issue of getting a NULL value for the fields in the InfoPath form. Try adding a delay activity with around 10seconds and see if your are able to get the value of the fields from InfoPath.
Refer to this link for more details: Why does my SharePoint workflow fail when the client is running Vista or Windows 7?
Try looking in your SharePoint Logs.
They are located under the 12-Hive in the LOGS folder - open up the latest and look for something with 'Workflow infrastructure' in it, maybe that can point you in the right direction.
The "solution" was to do an export and transfer to a new server. Basically just use STSADM to do the export operation and then import the same file on the new server.
SEE:
http://sharepointdogs.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/content-migration-or-backuprestore-in-moss-2007/
I was on the phone with Microsoft Support for hours on this issue - transferring to a new server would be my recommendation for anyone else that might encounter this problem.