Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Differences in debugged workflow

rlbogue — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:58:23 GMT

Eilene -- There's great information here. However, there are still a lot of little gotchas. (See my blog for the ones I've managed to make it through thus far.)

A few questions ...

1) I'm observing that the workflow that I'm getting while debugging is slightly different than the one I created and installed. For instance, a delayActivity and a codeActivity are removed. I'm also observing that the file reference is to a dynamically generated XOML file even though the original workflow is a CS file. Is there a way to get attached to the actual DLL? Is there any reason why certain activities might disappear while debugging?

2) As a sort of sidebar to the preceding, I've always believed that to debug items in the GAC you had to manually copy the PDB file into the GAC alongside the DLL. It looks like your post is saying that this isn't required. Is that because of the specific workflow debugging type?

3) You've previously mentioned that the task from a CreateTask activity isn't committed until a workflow is dehydrated. Other than putting a short duration delayActivity (1 second) is there a way to force a dehydration?

Rob Bogue [MVP]

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Cassius — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:27:05 GMT

Eilene,

This guide is nice, but what we really need is some documentation on MSDN.

Most of the workflow actions in the Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowActions namespace are completely undocumented.

Ditto for the Microsoft.SharePoint.Workflow namespace. Many of the classes don't even have a one-line description of what the heck they are for.

All the data exchange services -- IListItemService, ISharePointService, ITaskService, and IWorkflowModificationService -- completely undocumented. There can't be any serious work on custom Sharepoint workflow actions without some visiblity into how Sharepoint idles and reawakrens workflow instances.

Heck, that's just workflows. Half the MSDN entries in the Microsoft.Sharepoint namespace are blank as well.

Office 2007 is going live in about a month. I hope the Sharepoint team is aware of how woeful the documentation is right now.

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Daryl — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:32:48 GMT

rlbogue: "I'm observing that the workflow that I'm getting while debugging is slightly different than the one I created and installed."

I had this problem once. I wasn't debugging, but I noticed the workflow activity log had entries from an activity which I had removed from the workflow.

After loading the new workflow DLL into the GAC, you need to call IISRESET. By unloading the IIS process and starting a new one, you force it to map the new DLL into its memory space.

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Alex Angas — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:38:44 GMT

Hi Eilene,

I'm curious about the AssociateOnActivate element. There doesn't seem to be anything about this in the SDK or on the net in general. Can you give any more detail? Sounds exactly like what i'm looking for.

Thanks for these articles, they are a good practical overview.

Alex Angas.

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Eilene Hao — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 11:19:56 GMT

Hi Rob, here are some answers for your questions:

1) Yes, Daryl is right; don't forget to iisreset to refresh everything, and make sure your build and GAC'ed dll's are the same:). I believe the xoml is generated when it's compiled; you can actually create workflows using xoml directly instead of a cs file (haven't tried it, but I think there's a way). The resulting dll should be the same though, in either case.

2) I'm not sure about why this is the case for workflow. But based on my own experience, I've never copied over the pdb when debugging, which is why I didn't write anything about it;).

3) Yes, you can use OnTaskCreated to dehydrate before continuing.:)

Cassius, you're right, and thanks for the feedback! We have more info in the RTM SDKs, and we'll be updating after that to fill in any gaps. Sorry for the inconvenience! For now, there's a chart with the important SharePoint.Workflow classes in the summary doc I'll be attaching to my next post, and as a rule of thumb, any On* service method puts the workflow to sleep, anything that's not plows straight through and doesn't commit until it goes to sleep.

Daryl, thanks for the helpful advice:)

Alex, the example for how this works is the out-of-box Review workflows in MOSS. You'll notice that by default any item in a document library has Approval and Collect Feedback workflows available to run. There're not in the list of associations for the doc lib, so it's may seem like they're coming from nowhere, but in actuality, they are associated with the Document content type, which is the base type for doc lib items. This is done with this tag:). Just add <AssociateOnActivate>true</AssociateOnActivate> under the <Metadata> section of your workflow.xml to automatically make the workflow available on any item of the Document content type. It'll also automatically enable new instances in the association if you uninstall and reinstall the feature (they normally get set to No New Instances on deactivation).

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

rlbogue — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 05:36:56 GMT

Eilene --

I have a batch file that does the install (because I'm still copying in the PDB.) It's tearing down and rebuilding the stack -- complete with two IISRESETs. Yea, I know overkill, however, I don't want to take chances.

I rebooted the whole system and I got an accurate instance. ... Now all I have to do is figure out why the workflow won't rehydrate after a delay. I feel like the salmon swimming up stream (only to be snatched up by a bear at some point.)

Rob

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Daryl — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 06:34:01 GMT

rlbogue: "I have a batch file that does the install (because I'm still copying in the PDB.) It's tearing down and rebuilding the stack -- complete with two IISRESETs.. I rebooted the whole system and I got an accurate instance."

I sometimes wonder if the OWSTIMER.EXE process should be restarted as well when you replace a workflow DLL. I know this is sometimes the process responsible for (trying to) rehydrate workflow instances. Then again, it might just be telling Sharepoint to do it through a webservice or some such.

rlbogue: "Now all I have to do is figure out why the workflow won't rehydrate after a delay."

You're not the only one. Lots of people have this problem, and I've never heard anything from Microsoft about it. I had this problem back in Betas 2 and 2TR. Loads of people talk about it on microsoft.public.sharepoint.development_and_programming, but I've never seen a Microsoft employee post there. For all I know, they don't even read the newsgroup, which seems strange to me.

Eilene is helpful; maybe she'll shed some light on what's happening with selays.

Since installing the RTM release, my delays started returning. For some reason, they never rehydrate on the first "Workflow" timer job. Always on the second run, 6-10 minutes after the delay expires.

Knock on wood they're working for me right now. Lots of people still can't get DelayActivity's to return at all in Sharepoint, which makes the majority of real-life workflow scenarios impossible. :(

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Eilene Hao — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 12:39:07 GMT

Hi guys, there's a bug on delays at the moment; we're working on a patch that's almost ready. Sorry for the inconvenience.

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Daryl — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 23:17:47 GMT

Eilene,

Great to hear. Bugs will happen. Developers just want to know that 1. MS knows the bug exists, and 2. it will eventually get fixed.

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

rlbogue — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 15:29:46 GMT

Daryl--

The PSS folks are under water right now trying to stay in the newsgroups and as you can see some of the MVPs are struggling with keeping ahead of the demand. It should get better after the first of the year.

Rob

OnePage Workflow in SharePoint 2007

SharePoint, SharePoint and stuff — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:40:51 GMT

OnePage : der einfache Blick auf das Wesentliche - die wichtigsten Informationen zu einem Thema auf einer

Creating Workflows with Visual Studio 2005 (Walkthrough)

Bob Fox's Sharepoint Blog — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:25:23 GMT

Im not sure how many have found this yet but Eileen Hao has put together a Seven Part walkthrough with...

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Abhinandan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:51:14 GMT

Hey, could any one please tell me why I am not able to see the PostBuildActions.bat file when I am creating a Workflow library? Also please let me know how to create it.

Thanks in advance

WF inside of SharePoint

Matt W's Windows Workflow Place — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:51:34 GMT

I'm a little late to notice this, but Eilene Hao, a PM on the SharePoint Workflow team, has put together

SharePoint 2007 workflow development

Miguel Isidoro — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 04:24:06 GMT

Encontrei esta compilação interessante de recursos sobre desenvolvimento de workflows para

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Eilene Hao — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:21:06 GMT

Sorry about that, postbuildactions.bat is coming out with the RTM MOSS SDK, which is alllmost ready...

The GAC

VJ — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:39:05 GMT

Hi,

Perhaps I'm slow but I still don't get the relationship between the debugger and the GAC. Should the pdb be copied? If so how does one get the location? If not, why are breakpoints sometimes dissabled even after uploading the dll and resetting iis? Why do some dlls in the gac appear in windows\assembly\gac and others don't? Is there a bug in visual studio relating to this? Is there an article that explains this well and in simple terms, I'm tired of reading contradictory threads.

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

elizageojy — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 12:59:18 GMT

Eilene,

Can we deploy a workflow as feature using the markup language (.xoml)

Liz

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

luckshika — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:51:54 GMT

Hi,

delay activity bug issue yet fixed or not? I've installed RTM MOSS SDK. whenever my workflow hits delay activity it goes to sleep and never wakes up again.

any comment really appreciated!

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Isabelle — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:40:01 GMT

Hi Eilene,

when I want to used my deployed custom workflow I get "the form has been closed" do you know why I get this error.

I have been stuck for too long now, please help.

thanks

Isabelle

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Isabelle — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 16:25:01 GMT

Hi Eilene,

I just found the solution to the error "the form has been closed". In the workflow.xml in the MetaData section when I specified the FormURN of my Initiation Form it was wrong even if I copied and paste the Form ID in the InfoPath properties. It was urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:infopath:Initform:-myXSD-2007-03-08T01-00-06

instead of

urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:infopath:InitiationForm:-myXSD-2007-03-08T01-00-06

the name of the form was missed spelled.

Isabelle

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Don — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 04:31:42 GMT

Hi,

The sample workflow that Ive developed opens the Initiation form in Add workflow settings(List->Tasks->WorkflowSettings).

Is there a way where I get this form to open up when I click on Task->NewItem because instead of using the standard task new item details..i want to use the info path(Inititationform.xsn) to do this. Would this be possible.

Also, when I create a new item in tasks,the workflow triggers off but it shows 'Failed on start' in the log the error'The event receiver for the context is invalid'

Any feedback on this will help

Start Learning Workflows!!

Code Eater — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:46:53 GMT

Wow such an exciting topic to learn!! its nice and fun yet its a bit difficult to grasp easily,,, This

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Kevin S — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:27:55 GMT

Hi all,

Would anyone know why my workflow errors out with "Failed on Start". When I check the logs, it says it can't find my dll or one of its dependencies. I've loaded it to the GAC but don't know what else needs to be done for it to be found. This is a custom wf I built from an example, it uses an InfoPath Initiation form, accepts my text, then I contine the wf by submitting. At that point it should use my dll in the GAC, but it can't locate it. I verified that it's signed, version number, public key token - all correct.

Thanks for any help,

Kevin

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Suneetha.n — Mon, 07 May 2007 17:27:33 GMT

After doing all the steps when i do rebuild I am not able to see the PostBuildActions.bat file when I am creating a Workflow library? Also please let me know how to create it.

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

roky — Tue, 15 May 2007 21:17:14 GMT

Suneetha.n : You need the SharePoint workflow templates for Visual Studio. Those templates install when you install the SharePoint 2007 SDK.

Here's the link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6d94e307-67d9-41ac-b2d6-0074d6286fa9&displaylang=en

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Shashwat — Wed, 30 May 2007 15:21:59 GMT

Hi i am getting "Error occured" when i try to attach my custom workflow to the document library item.any clues?

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

revati — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:10:06 GMT

when i uploading a document,my workflow is showing the status as "falied on start(retrying)".

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

totmakov — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 11:00:19 GMT

I've got the same error "failed on start(retrying)". In log it says that something wrong with the context of workflow.

It seems that in VS workflow designer you can't set WorkflowId property of onWorkflowActivated activity. (This property simply is absent in the "Properties" window). But in ECM Starter Kit workflows this property was set (saw in *.Designer.cs file) and they work fine.

Is it cause of error? Is it bug?

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Min — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 07:12:15 GMT

When I start this sample workflow, I got errors like 'Workflow [myworkflowname] was canceled by System Account' and 'Failed on start'.

How can I fix these errors?

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Laxmikant — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 13:42:42 GMT

When I want to use my deployed custom workflow I get "the form has been closed" does anyone know why I get this error.

I have been stuck for too long now, please help.

Thanks,

Laxmikant

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Thor — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:38:00 GMT

Great. "Failed on Start (retrying)" an NO solution! Does Ms have a clue?

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Stiow — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 02:46:41 GMT

use Sharepoint Logging Spy for real time diagnostics to resolve these issues.

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Asif — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:49:57 GMT

Hi I am new to WF. I just created a new custom activity using VS. It built succefully but when I run it, I am getting the message "Unable to start program 'C:\Workflows\SendEmailC\bin\Debug\SendEmailC.dll". Would any one assist me in this problem?

Regards..

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Vimal Raj SG — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:28:08 GMT

I have created two Workflows for a site

1)A seperate Approval Group of the site who approves the Workflow ,whenever it is started.And it is working fine.

2)when i enable my second workflow(which is the Member Approval(the member group approves the document) for the same site, and start the workflow i got the error in sharepoint itself stating "An error has occured while starting the [Workflow name]".

it will be of great help ,if you can provide me some soln to this problem i am facing for sometime now..!:-(

Regards

Vimal raj

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

suryakant — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:03:44 GMT

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Ann — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:57:40 GMT

I was able to get rid of the Failed on Start error by repairing the .NET Framework 3.0 SP1. I put additional details in this blob post:

http://www.thesug.org/blogs/annw/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=6

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Seth Hildebrand — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:28:23 GMT

I've found one cause to workflows failing on start. When/If you create a new task in your workflow, make sure you set your TaskID equal to a new GUID. This is easy to miss if you bind your TaskID property from the CreateTask activity, rather than specifying a hard coded Guid for the TaskID. On your handler for the CreateTask activity, put code in place that sets the variable that you bound against.. something like "taskID = Guid.NewGuid()".

Problem on edit SPFile properties from a workflow.

yfrolov — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:38:24 GMT

Hi,

I've tried to create simple sequential workflow in VS 2008. Everything works fine except I can't edit any property of the SPFile from the workflow. No exceptions fired, no messages in a log.

Are there any ideas what the problem could be. Thanks much!

Yuriy.

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

halomez — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:21:33 GMT

I have a problem where it appears the workflow starts before the file is complete in a document library. I have a scheduled task that copies an XML file from a remote system via the WebClient. When my workflow starts it loads the XML into an XMLDocument object via workflowProperties.Item.File. But it gives me an error "root element is missing". When I manually upload the same file it works. I added a Thread.Sleep(30000) method to my code just before loading the file as a work around, but is there a better way to tell if the file has finished loading?

re: Developing Workflows in VS: Part 6 - Deploy and Debug your workflow

Chandra — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 09:20:47 GMT

I have a workflow developed and deployed on the production site.Due to the change request we had to change the workflow by adding a number of states and event driven activities when i deploy the changed workflow with the same dll name i have seen that the already existing items on the production site which were In progress dead and not moving forward where as the new items where using the new version of the dll.Is there any way that i can force the older items In Progress to use the new version of the workflow.

Thanks in advance

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