Zoki's Blog

When future comes first! iDevolution

SharePoint Workflows and DelayActivity problem

While working on one of my WSS 3.0 projects recently I came up with a problem that was very annoying for me. The problem was related with the custom workflow made for one of the lists in SharePoint site. The workflow used a couple of Delay activities which did not worked consistently. After the Delay activity went to 'sleep' it never wakes up...never. I've searched Google and saw that the community already had this problem and so I started to go step by step. So I am writing you the steps that I did to make the Delay activity timer to resume correctly after reloading a workflow. Take in consideration that my environment was WSS 3.0 with SP1 on Vista with SQL Server 2005:

  1. Check the Windows SharePoint Services Timer if it is running. It was running, I made restart of the service and still did not worked.
  2. Check the ScheduledWorkItems table in my site content database to see if the activity saves the reloading time as it should. You can see the reload time under the DeliveryDate column. Everything was fine here, so the problem was not related to this.
  3. Installed the following hotfix from Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6096ce0f-d21e-47ac-afe2-d4e1c2fce670&displaylang=en. It didn't worked also.
  4. Then at last I found this infrastructure upgrade on the Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog: Announcing: Availability of Infrastructure Updates. Install this upgrade, restart the Windows SharePoint Services Timer and you should be OK. The Delay activity should start working as expected.

I hope that this will help someone as it did for me.

Comments

Milena said:

Hello Zoki,

did you use state workflow or sequentual when working with delays? I am using state workflow with several delays and I have installed infrastructure updates but it doesen't help.

# March 10, 2009 2:07 AM

Zoki said:

I was using sequential workflow...

# March 10, 2009 3:21 AM

stephen said:

Thanks for this!  You totally saved my bacon

--Stephen

# April 10, 2009 5:40 PM

LnddMiles said:

Great post! I’ll subscribe right now wth my feedreader software!

# July 21, 2009 10:33 AM

ElenaLisvato said:

There is obviously a lot to know about this.  I think you made some good points in Features also.

# August 4, 2009 9:15 AM
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