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.

Creating While Loops in SharePoint Designer Workflows using Stateful Workflows

For an update on this topic please see this blog entry: https://nickgrattan.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/while-loops-in-sharepoint-designer-workflows/

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.

Update: 10-Nov-2013. Source code and WSP now available in GitHub: https://github.com/NickGrattan/NGCCustomActivities.git

Custom Workflow Action: Send to Records Center

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 GitHub: https://github.com/NickGrattan/NGCCustomActivities.

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: