I'm having a strange security problem with a SharePoint workflow. Particular calls seem to result in the following exception:
Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: The
security validation for this page is
invalid.
I've come across this error before and the simple fix is
web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;
...
web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false;
However I've never once encountered this problem inside a workflow before since a workflow runs as system. I first got this error in a code activity where I set the value of a column on the list item. Wrapping the item.Update in AllowUnsafeUpdates fixed it.
After the code activity I have a CreateTask activity. This also causes the same error but only after running the code inside the activity's MethodInvoking.
In both cases there's a SPListItem.UpdateItem involved within the stack trace. This call is failing a security check. I don't know anything about how this check works so I don't know where to look next.
This is a strange one, because this SharePoint dev machine has been working fine for some time. No other projects or workflows exhibit this behaviour so that rules out an installation problem. There's just something about this particular workflow.
[UPDATE]
I've gotten around the issue by just creating a new project and building it up again. I still have the broken one and I'd still like to figure out the problem with it. I'd appreciate any suggestions of what it might be.
I haven't seen this happen in a workflow, but there are two cases where I have seen it. Maybe one of those will be helpful.
Updating an item on the GET of a SharePoint page instead of on the POST (ie, Page.IsPostBack is false). Setting AllowUnsafeUpdates to true fixes it.
Updating an item on the POST of a SharePoint page when impersonating or running with elevated privileges. Calling SPUtility.ValidateFormDigest fixes it.
Related
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.
Not quite sure what I've done to screw up SPD2010 (was working), but it displayed
Sharepoint Designer cannot display the item
What you can try:
Click refresh ... blah
Most likely causes
The file has been deleted from the site
The site is encountering problems
I can't see anything related in event viewer. I think is web service related as I think the queries are made via a WS?
In my case it wasn’t a solution. So, I made a backup of the site collection before to try anything. After a lot of time and different problems I figured out that some lists were causing the missreading. I tried one more time to get the lists in SharePoint Designer 2010 just to cause some entries in the log. After that I opened the log file and looked for something like: “Failed to determine the setup path of the list schema for feature {GUID}, list template XXX.”. With the GUID I looked for a match here. http://sharepoint-geek.com/2010/10/08/sharepoint-2007-moss-features/
With the feature name I used this blog: http://aurramu.blogspot.com/2011/03/failed-determine-setup-path-of-list.html.
With the feature re-installed I went to SPD and it worked like a charm.
I hope it helps someone else.
It appears this was caused by a "phantom" list definition. I experienced a number of other problems (some in SP some in SPD), all generating variations of this error;
<nativehr>0x8107058a</nativehr><nativestack></nativestack>
The problem list definition was deployed and undeployed from VS2010, so I have no idea why it was still around! The Sharepoint UI wont allow you to remove it (errors as above), so the trick is to use the stsadm powershell command with forcedeletelist as detailed here
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262609(office.12).aspx
Hope this helps someone else !
We have a long standing issue in our bug tracking system about the dreaded "ERROR: request not found in the TrackedRequests. We might be creating and closing webs on different threads." message in SharePoint's trace log.
As we develop Workflow software for the SharePoint market, we look into this issue from time to time to make sure it is not caused by our products. I have personally come to the conclusion that this is a problem in SharePoint, but perhaps someone else can prove me wrong.
Here is what I know:
According to the hundreds of search results returned by Google on this topic, this issue appears to be mainly related to SharePoint Workflows, both SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio based workflows.
Assuming ULS logging is set to Monitorable, the easiest way to reproduce this problem is to create a new SharePoint Designer Workflow, attach it to a document library, set it to auto start on add/update, don't add any actions, save the workflow and upload a file to the document library.
The error is only visible in the SharePoint trace log, it does not appear to impact the execution of the workflow at hand.
I have verified that the problem occurs on 32 bit as well as 64 bit systems, Win2K3 and 2K8, WSS and MOSS with SharePoint versions up to the December 2009 Cumulative Update (6524).
The problem does not occur when a workflow is started manually.
There are dozens of related posts on MSDN Forums, hundreds on Google, one on StackOverflow and none on SharePoint Overflow. There appears to be no answer.
Does anyone have any idea about what is going on, what is causing this and if we should worry or file this under 'Red Herrings'.
Update: Microsoft has confirmed this is a known issue that can be safely ignored. It will not be fixed in SP2007, but is no longer a problem in SP2010.
File it under Red Herrings. You say "The error is only visible in the SharePoint trace log, it does not appear to impact the execution of the workflow at hand." There are so many errors logged in the ULS Log that are beyond our control and do not immediately impact our environment. If you want to improve the product you could attempt a support call that may be non-incremented as a bug. However, what if it's not a bug, but just a verbose ULS Log message?
In fact, this verbosity isn't limited to just the ULS Logs. Have you seen the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007? It filters out the noise events from the Event Logs on your farm so you can concentrate on the events that flag an actual problem.
This is a really good question and I'm starving to see good responses to this. I've seen this error in my workflows in very different contexts.
For instance, In my case it happens in a home-baked custom activity when I catch the "task created" event and try to "breakroleinheritance" of the SPListItem (the new task).
My custom activity gets workflow context through a property wfActProps which is of type SPWorkflowActivationProperties. Then I typically use wfActProps.Web to access the web object.
The first thought I had that maybe it's a bad tone to pass SPWorkflowActivationProperties between different activities, however I have not found any different way yet.
I'm setting "community wiki" to my answer since this is not an actual answer, rather an example of a situation where this error can be seen.
When I look at the stacktrace (I'm assuming the person who posted that message is referring to the same error), it looks like an OOTB event receiver (Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow.SPWorkflowAutostartEventReceiver) which is responsible for autostarting workflows is disposing an SPSite that may not have been created by the event receiver code.
Unfortunately the AutoStartWorkflow() method is obfuscated so I can't really see in Reflector which SPSite is being disposed. You could experiment writing your own EventReceiver that disposes any existing SPSite it can get it's hands on and see if that causes the same error to be logged.
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.
I have a custom action in a workflow and would like to report an error to the user when something goes wrong. What's the best way of doing that?
UPD: Ideally I would like to put the workflow in the error state and log a message to the workflow log. That doesn't seem possible. What's the closest I can get to it? I want to a reusable solution,something that's easy for users to set up when using my custom action in SharePoint Designer.
Added more details to the question.
#mauro that takes care of storing the error, but how do I display the error to the user in a way which makes sense?
#AdamSane That's seems like a rather fragile solution. It's not a matter of setting this up once on a single site. I need something others can add using SPD.
when you throw the error your error handler can then email the user, or better if the list is massive, add the error state to the workflow item - i think this is default functionality though as the error would be mentioned there.
http://www.sharepointsecurity.com/blog/sharepoint/sharepoint-2007-development/fault-handling-in-sharepoint-workflows/
Personally I would log it to either a log file or the event log depending on the issue. I think storing it using a users permissions would be a bad idea, what happens if that user does not have the correct rights? or worse still they get elevated permissions by browsing the list in explorer view?
The log file would be the best way, that way you rely only on the file system being available - you dont have to worry about trapping errors happening whilst connecting to the database etc.
Mauro
Add the error to a hidden list with that users name. Set the visibility on the list (for users) to only read/write their own values. Then use a custom web part or FlexListViewer to view the contents of that list and display it to the user. Once they acknowledge that error, remove it from the list.
If necessary, you can add a different workflow action on that message list, that says pause for 2 days and then email. Whatever, depending on your requirements.
Otherwise you can have a custom db table that you use for pretty much the same thing, this way sharepoint does most of the work for you.
Update This can be packaged up as a feature and deployed to each site as needed. The strengths of this approach (adding a list item to a list, querying, alerting a user, and emailing a user) are all built into the sharepoint itself. In this case you can focus on your custom logic only, while letting sharepoint focus on the implementation details.
If you need the user to take some action as a result of the error (e.g. retrying the workflow) is it possible to create a task for that user with information on the error and the location of the workflow?