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.
Related
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
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.
I have created a custom list in SharePoint 2010 programmatically. It works fine on my development machine when I deploy the project (that contains the list) to the SP site on my machine. I can see the list being deployed under lists. But when I package the whole solution and deploy the solution to test site on our test server on another machine the list seems to be missing on that sever (it does not exists under lists on that site).
There are some other custom lists within the project which are fine and are deployed properly but this one is not.
I finally managed to fix this mystery to my relief!
The problem was the feature that was supposed to put the list on the SP server, did not do its job.
When I first created the custom list in VS, I added it to an existing feature in the solution. But for some reason which I still cannot understand, the feature did not put the new list on the server. But when I created a new feature and added the list to it, it did put the list on the server when it got activated.
I compared the two features together. They both have the same properties. The only difference is the existing feature includes some more items to deploy and has an event receiver associated with it though the event receiver does not do anything that could prevent the new list from getting deployed.
I cannot understand this behaviour and would appreciate an input if someone can explain it to me.
I hope this will help other people who might come across this issue before they start banging their heads against the wall!
It is solution deployment type. Press F4 when in Package.package. Set "Deployment server type" to WebFrontEnd.
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.
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.