Hi all,
A few years ago I designed an infopath form that is integrated with Sharepoint. The form is filled out and upon submit it is added to sharepoint with a number of properties promoted. In sharepoint I have workflows that run on create and on update. I check for certain conditions in my workflow to send out emails to let people know the form has been added and to begin processing it and also to send out emails at various points until the form is complete.
These forms are used quite a bit and are for the most part error free, the workflows run fine without error, but after our upgrade from sharepoint 2007 to 2010, the error notifications started coming more frequent. Prior to the upgrade I could count on 1 hand the number of workflow failures we had in a year, but after they started popping up 1 to 2 times a week.
3 months ago I had the users start tracking the workflow failures 3 months ago and out of 430 forms, 17 of them have had workflow failure. The number of errors is quite low all things considered but any errors mean manual maintenance of the list to look for failures which is time people have to spend that they wouldn't otherwise if I had 0 errors.
The specific error message is either failed on start(retrying) or Error Occurred. When drilling down the error message either says unknown error or "The workflow could not update the item, possibly because one or more columns for the item require a different type of information."
Over the last few months, I've added logging and found that on the "run on create" workflow, the properties aren't set when the workflow starts for some forms which was weird. I figured, no worries, I could have the workflow start and wait 1 minute after every form is added to sharepoint to give it enough time for the properties to be filled in but that didn't stop the issue from happening.
I thought that maybe the form being added was a create and the properties being filled out was considered a change so I added in the same code from my create workflow to my on change workflow, but that didn't seem to work either.
The weird thing is for the ones that run through fine, only the On Create workflow is run and the on change isn't ran until someone actually makes a change to the form, but on the ones that fail, both the On Create workflow and the On Change workflow run at the exact same time.
I've tried numerous things I've found on the internet to try and fix the problem and nothing seems to work. Any ideas what i can do to get rid of these workflow failures?