Nick Grattan’s SharePoint Blog

Here’s some additional information to this post about this subject.

An alternative to our solution for while loops in SharePoint Designer workflows have been previously proposed based on setting a workflow to start when an item is changed. This gets over the problem of how to get a workflow to restart itself (which we do with the “Restart This Workflow” action). You can find a description of how to do this here: http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/development/the-dog-ate-my-task-use-sharepoint-designer-to-email-daily-task-reminders

However, the technique of a workflow restarting itself when an item changes will not work with SP2. Take a look at this Microsoft post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2009/07/13/service-pack-2-prevents-an-on-change-workflow-from-starting-itself.aspx

In SP2 a workflow cannot restart itself recursively, and so this will break stateful workflows written in this way. Seems strange that Microsoft would introduce a breaking change when using these techniques have been well documented.

Amongst several significant limitations with SharePoint Designer workflows, perhaps the most important is the lack of looping. Therefore, expressing processes like “while not approved, rework” becomes difficult.

We have published a paper that describes how to implement while loops by emulating stateful workflows in Microsoft SharePoint Designer. You can download the paper here (PDF, Oct 2009). The technique uses our “Restart this workflow” custom action, which is part of our “Custom Activity Pack” which can be downloaded here for free.

Our Custom Activity Pack contains actions that can be installed for use in Microsoft SharePoint Designer workflows. The latest version includes an action for sending documents and items to a Records Center site collection directly from your workflows.

The Custom Activity Pack is free and can be downloaded from our web site at http://www.nickgrattan.net/Downloads.aspx.

Other custom actions in this pack include:

• Start Workflow – Start another workflow for the item or document and return.
• Call Workflow – Start another workflow and wait until that workflow has completed.
• Halt Workflow – Halt another workflow executing against the item or document.
• Restart This Workflow – great for implementing stateful workflows in SharePoint Designer
• Is Workflow Running – check if another workflow is running against the item or document.

Here is the entire list of actions:

By default, SharePoint designer will automatically select an existing Task list or create a new one if a suitable Task list does not exist. To change the Task list being used:

1. Create a new Task list using Site Actions + Create.
2. Find the Id (Guid) for this new list following the technique described in my blog entry here.
3. Using SharePoint Designer, open the site where the workflow exists, expand out the “Workflows” folder and the workflow whose Task list is to be changed.
4. Locate the file called workflowname.xoml.wfconfig.xml and open this file for editing.
5. Take the Id found in (2) above and replace the Id in the “<Association>” element’s “TaskListID” attribute.
6. Save the file.

Creating workflows with the Microsoft SharePoint Designer is quick and simple. However, there are number of distinct limitations which you need to be aware of, such as:

• Workflows have no looping or flow control statements. Workflows execute serially from the top to the bottom. Implementing flows such as “continue executing until approval is made” becomes problematic.

Update 25 Nov 2009: See this post for how while loops can be simulated using stateful workflows with Microsoft SharePoint Designer.

• Workflows can only be associated with lists, not content types. This can be limiting when you allow, for example, users to select one of a number of InfoPath forms on the “New” menu and you want different workflows depending on the type of document created.

Update 25 Nov 2009: You will have to wait until SharePoint Designer 2010 and SharePoint 2010 for this!

• Workflows are associated with a single list. You can, though, using the technique described here copy them to other lists.

This list doesn’t include limitations in the standard actions provided by Microsoft SharePoint designer – custom actions written in Visual Studio can help in this case.

Users can create alerts and receive emails when an item, for example, is added to a list. This is often used to send alerts when new tasks have been added for a user.

You may find that the date format for the email message is incorrect and does not follow the regional settings for your site. For example, on a server configured for “UK” regional settings the date format may use the US format:

To correct this you need to change the default (system) locale of the Windows 2003 server.  You can check the current locale by running MSInfo.Exe located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSInfo.

Note that this will change the date format for all emails sent to users by SharePoint and may upset our American friends and this may impact other services!

To do this follow these instructions (a server restart will be required and you may need the Windows 2003 CD to complete the change):

• Run the Control Panel
• Select Regional and Language Options
• Select the Advanced tab

• Select “English (United Kingdom)” or your own particular locale for Language for non-Unicode programs.
• Click OK.
• Set the Regional Settings for the SharePoint site to UK.

Your alert messages should now display with the correct date format: