Re: Copying List Workflows

Hilary Stoupa — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 15:46:40 GMT

Thank you so much for posting this! I'm sure you are going to save others some research and trial and error. :)

Copying List Workflows

Steve Greenwood — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 15:40:03 GMT

I had developed a complex Info Path form with several long SharePoint workflows associated with it. For various reasons, I needed to copy the form and the workflows to another SharePoint site belonging to a different department in my organisation. Copying and publishing the form to the second site was easy enough, but the workflows did not copy at the same time, of course. I soon found out that there was no simple copy facility to do this. However, after a bit of searching, I discovered that it could possibly be done by exporting and importing again using Microsoft Visio. You don’t actually need to purchase Visio to do this – all I did was download the free Visio reader software directly from Microsoft. (You may not even need to do this, but it was free anyway.)

The suggested solutions involved changing the file extensions to zip files, opening them and then changing them back again before copying. However, I couldn’t get it to work – the copied files weren’t being recognized. However, eventually I found a method that did work – it’s a combination of a couple of online solutions. I’m no great expert, and some of the steps might be unnecessary, but it worked for me. Here it is:-

1. Open your destination SharePoint site using SharePoint Designer (SPD).

2. Create a new blank workflow in your destination site. Give it the same name as the workflow that you wish to copy. (e.g. xxxxxxxxxx)

3. Add at least one “Condition” and one “Action” to the workflow. It doesn’t matter what they are, they will be overwritten later. I used the condition “created by a specific person” and the action “send an e-mail”, using my name each time.

4. Save and publish the workflow. Using the navigation bar, come out of the editing page and go back to the workflow information and settings page. Ensure that in the settings, “Task List” is set to “Tasks” and “History List“ is set to “Workflow History”. Save and publish again.

5. Go back to the “Workflows” page using the navigation bar again. Select (don’t open)the workflow you have just created, and from the top menu bar, click “Export to Visio”, and save it to you desktop when prompted – it will appear as a .vwi folder.

6. Open your source SharePoint site from SPD. You should now have two SPD folders open – the source where you are copying from, and the destination where you are copying to. In the source folder, select “workflows” from the left hand menu as before.

7. From the list of workflows, select the one you want to copy, and again “Export to Visio”, this time saving it in a different location – not the desktop, as it will overwrite the new one. (Bizarrely, this is actually what you want, but you cannot do it directly!) You will end up with another .vwi folder.

8. Change the file extensions on each of these .vwi folders by adding .zip at the end. They will both become xxxxxxxxxx.vwi.zip folders. Ignore the warning messages.

9. Right click on each one in turn, and extract the zipped files (“Extract All”) You can just store the unpacked folders in the same locations as the zipped folders. You will see that the file extensions change back to .vwi but now you can open them!

10. In both the unpacked folders you should see four files:-

[Content_Types].xml

workflow.xoml

workflow.xoml.rules

workflow.xoml.wfconfig.xml

The files you want are workflow.xoml and workflow.xoml.rules

11. Copy these two files from the unpacked source .vwi folder, and paste into the unpacked .vwi folder on your desktop – the destination.

12. Unfortunately, you can’t yet import the modified .vwi folder back into your destination workflow. You will notice that although the file extension is correct, the icon doesn’t look as it did when you exported it in the first place, and Visio won’t recognize it. You need to zip it again and then rename the file extension as follows:-

13. Open the now modified .vmi file saved on your desktop. You need to re-zip the four files again – select them so they are highlighted, right click and choose the zip (might be called 7-zip) facility. From the drop down, select “Add to xxxxxxxxxx.vwi.zip” (the x’s will be whatever your workflow is called, of course). You should now have a fifth zipped file.

14. Re-name the extension of this new zipped file by simply removing the .zip from the end, and you will get a .vmi file that will be recognizable when you try to import it using Visio.

15. Finally, open your destination SPD folder, and close all the tabs except for the one that lists the workflows. Select “import rom Visio” from the top menu, browse to your desktop location, and select the .vmi file from within the .vmi file. When you click on “open”, you should get a message warning that you are about to overwrite an existing workflow – click “finish”, and your copied workflow will appear!

16. Now save and publish once more, and you’re done. You can delete all the exported and zipped files saved on your desk top and other location if you want.

Warning – because you have copied a workflow from one site to another, you may have to amend some of the individual steps if they refer to locations in the original site. However, this is a lot less work than re-writing a complex workflow. You’ll also have to change how the workflows start – the copied ones will default to “manual start” only.