Creating While Loops in SharePoint Designer Workflows using Stateful Workflows – Part 2

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.