(this post was written using a SharePoint 2010 environment)
This post details the steps involved in delegating or reassigning a workflow task to another person as part of a workflow process.
My organisation has several approval workflows in action within our SharePoint 2010 environment, but one request I get all the time is to change who the approval has been sent to.
Approval tasks can be assigned as part of a workflow process, built via SharePoint designer or Nintex workflows. Once assigned, notification message(s) are sent to the approver and can either be approved via the Workflow Tasks section of a current item or via lazy approval if you have Nintex.
As this can be done with both regular SharePoint designer workflows and Nintex workflows, I’ll detail the steps below on how to switch the approver for both types of workflows.
Reassign a workflow task in SharePoint Designer workflows
In this example I have the following components configured:
A custom list with two columns: Title, Assigned To
A SharePoint Designer workflow that starts an approval process action on the current item and sets the approver as the person listed in Assigned To
Approval tasks are created within the workflows associated task list
An example SharePoint Designer workflow that uses the “Start Approval Process” task action on the current item and sets the approver as the person selected in the current item’s Assigned To field.
The steps below will demonstrate how to reassign an approver inside a workflow task:
Open your main list (in my example the custom list)
Either click on the status of your workflow for the current item (if column is displayed), or highlight the current item > under List Tools > Items > Press Workflows
NOTE: In some cases, the site owners or SharePoint admins may have hidden the workflow status column that gets created when you publish your workflow. If you can’t see this column, don’t worry just follow the other method described above.
If you press the Workflows button > left-click on the name of your running workflow(If you pressed the workflow status from the previous step, ignore this step)
Press the name of your running workflow to access the workflow tasks.
Under Tasks > click on the drop-down icon next to the title or your task > Press Edit Item
Press Edit Item by opening the drop-down menu next to the title of the workflow task.
A new pop-up window will open, at this point you will see the properties of the workflow task which includes:
Status – the status of the current workflow task (not started, approved, rejected)
Consolidated comments – Comments of the requester and all previous participants
Due date – the date set for workflow tasks to be completed by
Comments – allows the approver to enter any comments about why the item was approved or rejected
The workflow tasks pop-up window.
There will be four grey buttons at the bottom of the window > Press Reassign Task
Press the reassign task button.
In Reassign Task To > select the person you wish to reassign the task to and press Send
Delegate workflow tasks in Nintex workflows
In this example I have the following components configured:
A custom list with several columns, but namely: Title, Approver
Nintex Workflow 2010 version (2.3.10.0)
A Nintex workflow that uses a flexi task action to send an approval request task to the approver as the person listed in Approver column from the custom list
Approval tasks are created within the workflows associated task list
Flexi task to send approval to the person set in the current items Approver field.
The steps below will demonstrate how to delegate an approver inside a workflow task:
Open your main list (in my example the custom list)
Highlight the current item > under List Tools > Items > Press Workflows
Left-click on the name of your running workflow
Under Tasks > click on the drop-down icon next to the title or your task > Press Edit Item
Press Edit Item by opening the drop-down menu next to the title of the workflow task.
A new pop-up window will open, at this point you will see the properties of the workflow task which includes:
Outcome – the status of the approval task (approved or rejected) or delegate the task to another person
Comment – allows the approver to enter any comments about why the item was approved or rejected
Item Properties – a view of some of the list item properties for the current item associated with the workflow task
Within the workflow task, press delegate this task to change the approver.
Press delegate this task. At this point the pop-up window will change to display the following fields:
Delegate – this is used to specify the user to assign the selected task to
Comments – this is used to provide instructions or additional information to the user the task is being delegated to
To delegate to a new approver, click on the address book icon on the right to select a user from the Select People or Group dialog box
Add any additional comments in the Comments field. This text is appended to the ‘Approval Required’ notification that is sent to the delegated user.
Use the address book within the delegate field to assign the task to another approver.
On July 6, Microsoft announced that they will be retiring SharePoint 2010 workflows from November 1, 2020. I decided when reading the news that I would hold fire on writing something just to let the dust settle a little bit.
So after being inspired by John Liu’s blog post, I’ve decided to keep my own rolling list of resources to help myself and hopefully others transition from SharePoint 2010 workflows to Power Automate.
Microsoft had stated in 2016 that support would continue for SharePoint 2010 workflows until 2026, but with this month’s announced they specified that:
– Starting August 1st, 2020, SharePoint 2010 workflows will be turned off for newly created tenants.
– Starting November 1st, 2020, Microsoft will begin to remove the ability to run or create SharePoint 2010 workflows from existing tenants.
This applies to both out-the-box and custom SharePoint 2010 workflows, but only in Microsoft 365. If you are still on premises this does not apply to you as they are still being supported until 2026 at the time of writing, but I imagine you have your own issues to deal with!
For SharePoint 2013 workflows, Microsoft announced they will remain supported, but depreciated. So that means that SharePoint 2013 workflows will be turned off by default for new tenants starting in November 2020, but Microsoft will provide a PowerShell script to activate the workflow engine.
What does this mean?
Unless Microsoft has a change of heart, what this means is that over the next 4 months all SharePoint 2010 workflows will need to be re-developed using Power Automate, Nintex or any other another third-party workflow solution.
Microsoft offer a modernization scanner that (amongst other things), will understand where “classic” workflow is being used and sort of grade them based on number of actions and complexity. However, this scanner only works for SharePoint Online, so if you’ve yet to migrate to Microsoft 365 you will need to use another assessment/ inventory tool to get this sort of information about your SharePoint 2010 workflows.
What I’m going to do
So for myself, my organisation has several SharePoint 2010 and Nintex workflows on premise that have yet to be migrated to Microsoft 365 and are largely still in use.
As part of discovery work conducted previously, I’ve used a combination of ShareGates site report to get the high level information about my sites(s), the SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool to get information about my SharePoint workflows and a PowerShell script to get similar information about the Nintex workflows.
Even with a complete list of SharePoint 2010 workflows, there is still some documented pain points that will require some thought to overcome – this won’t be a straight copy/ paste into Power Automate 😀
However, with that said the plan is essentially the same as before; assess the active workflows, consolidate where possible and re-build the SharePoint workflows in Power Automate – only in a much shorter time frame…
Resource list
I will keep updating this list as I see new articles, or information from Microsoft and others.
I recently ran into an issue where I was getting the dreaded “failed on start” error for some of the workflows in a SharePoint 2010 environment. At first I was concerned that some sort of Microsoft KB had killed workflows again as described here and here.
However, that didn’t appear to be the case. After some investigation I noticed that the files that make up a particular list/ library workflow were checked out!
The problem(s)
This first issue was the “failed on start” error message in the workflow field within the list. It was a pretty niche edge case though as it appeared to only affect newer workflows that contained a send email action.
Another interesting issue was that when creating brand new workflows to test if the error persists brought its own set of problems. Once published, the new workflow would appear as normal to be ran manually for a new list item and would proceed to fail on start.
Workflows failing on start from within SharePoint 2010.
However, any new list items would not have the workflow listed to be ran against. Jumping back into SharePoint Designer proved equally useless as clicking on the workflow within the list just brought you to a SharePoint error.
Then I found that digging deeper into the workflow files within SharePoint Designer showed that some of the files that make up a workflow were in a checked out state – what?
You are unable to check these files in, as when you try you receive a message stating:
“Server error: you cannot discard check out because there is no checked in version of the document. please delete this document instead”.
After googling this, as I’d never seen this before led me to this brilliant post on SharePoint stack exchange which brought me to a resolution. Specifically, this comment:
I also would like to thank TashasEv for his answer. It provided the key clue I needed for troubleshooting a similar problem. In my case, it was not the Document content type which had the title set to Required, but the User Workflow Document content type.
This is one of two content types that are shown listed when (in SPD) you right-click on the Workflows folder in the left Navigation panel (the other being Folder). I used the Administration Web Page (it’s a button in SPD when on the Properties tab for the Workflows folder). Changing the Title property of this content type to Optional solved the issue.
So as described in the above post, here are the steps involved:
1. Find the hidden properties menu
Open SharePoint Designer 2010 and open the site where you workflow is running
Press All Files > Workflows
Open Workflows from with All Files in SharePoint Designer.In Workflows, after clicking on the affected workflow you will see all the files associated that are in a checked out state.
Right-click on any workflow (I selected the affected one) > press Properties
“Hidden” properties button can be found by right-clicking on a workflow.
2. Set the title of the user workflow document content type to optional
Within Properties, under Content Types > select User Workflow Document
Under Customization > press Edit content type columns
Within the User Workflow Document, press the edit content type columns button.
Select the Title column > then press Administration Web Page
This will open a browser window, under column settings set the column to Optional
Make the hidden title column optional from the administration web page.
3. Re-publish the affected workflow(s)
Navigate to the affected workflow(s) via the Lists and Libraries section
Open your workflow, make a small amend > Save and Publish
Now, when you run the workflow(s) affected they should complete as normal, and if you check the files within the All Files > Workflows section in SharePoint Designer they should be checked in and all OK.
(this post was written using a SharePoint online environment and SharePoint Designer 2013)
So here’s the scenario, there is a central list where users add items and once submitted a workflow runs that assigns tasks to separate task lists. No big deal right?
The scenario
Task actions in SharePoint 2013 workflows are a pretty standard thing, the example above just assigns tasks to different lists (think HR, IT, Pensions) for work to be completed. The additional requirement I had was for these tasks to notsend any system generated assignment emails when the tasks are assigned.
Example of creating & assigning a task in a SharePoint 2013 workflow.
The problem
This one really had me pulling my hair, but in a nutshell there is no obvious way to turn on/ off the emails that are system generated at the point which a task is assigned.
When you double-click on a task, an “Assign a Task” window opens. Within this window there is an “Email options” drop down, but this only has the email editor for the task creation email and the ability to turn on/ off the task overdue email(s). It doesn’t have any settings for switching on/ off the initial emails themselves.
The Assign a Task window doesn’t contain the properties to switch off system generated emails.
The hidden task properties pane
So at this point I began thinking there is no way to do this and the design for this process is now fundamentally flawed…until I right-clicked!
If you right-click on the list within the assign task action (the ICT Task List Members bit underlined in the example below) a menu will appear. Normally this menu contains some simple options like moving an action up or down. However, with task actions there is an additional option called “properties”.
Hidden properties button within the “assign a task” action.
After clicking on the “Properties” button, you’ll find an additional “Assign a Task Properties” window which contains the following, hidden properties:
Hidden assign a task properties window.
PreserveIncompleteTasks: set to true if you want non-completed tasks to be deleted when the task process is complete.
WaiveAssignmentEmail: set to false if you want to have an email sent out to the assignee when a task is created
WaiveCancelationEmail: set to false if you want to have an email sent out to the assignee when a task is canceled.
By default, all of these properties that are set to “no” or “false”, so will send emails based on the above parameters. To change, just click on the drop down next to each option and update to “yes” or “true” and the emails will stop sending!
It’s back again…a few months ago a wrote about my experiences with workflows failing on start after a .NET security update that was applied. You can read that post here:
Recently, the same .NET security update was applied to our SharePoint 2010 farm, which in turn caused the failing on start error to present itself again across all the workflows in the farm.
After identifing the issue soon after the update was applied, we decided to follow the same tact as before and roll back the patches, restart the servers and re-test the workflows – However, this time the results were different.
What was different?
Previously, rolling back the security update and any other patches added during this time, plus restarting the servers “fixed” the issue. This time, the same process did not yeald the same results and the workflows were still broken.
After performing the steps above, we observed that standard SharePoint workflows with a pause started to run sucessfully again, but Nintex workflows with a pause step either failed on start, or completed but errored after the pause step and sent an error notification.
Example 1 of nintex workflow with pause step failing on startExample 2 of nintex workflow with pause step erroring, but completing
How we fixed it…
So this time we followed the updated step-by-step guide provided below on how to update the web.config files and OWS timer files via Add-CodeDomAuthorizedTypeToOWSTimerConfig.ps1 PowerShell script on the SharePoint Application server.
We ran the script as recommended, which re-added the assemblies and dependancies to the OWSTimer config file and the web.config files on associated web servers and this in fact fixed the issue! As the script does an IIS reset/ Timer Job recycle we didnt even need to restart the servers!
I hope the that tidbit regarding the nintex workflow pauses helps someone else 🙂
I had this issue myself in the last week where EVERY SINGLE workflow across the farm on premise stopped working. SharePoint Designer and Nintex workflows all reported “Failed to start” when triggered to run.
The workflows stopped working due to a series of .NET security updates Microsoft released in September 2018. Microsoft released a public KB article on this – with resolution steps which can be found below:
I noticed shortly after the fix was implemented that some of my SharePoint designer workflows were exhibiting odd behaviour. For example the screenshot below shows a SharePoint desinger workflow that previously worked without issue or errors in the history after the fix was applied:
Someone on reddit had already spotted this which drew my attention to the common issue, this only presents itself for workflows with pause steps!
I will update this post with my findings once this latest fix is applied.
Symptom
After applying .NET Security Only patch to resolve CVE-2018-8421 (Remote Code Execution Vulnerability) , all SharePoint out of the box Workflows fail to execute and the log will show an error like this:
09/13/2018 01:59:07.57 w3wp.exe (0x1868) 0x22FC SharePoint Foundation Workflow Infrastructure 72fs Unexpected RunWorkflow: Microsoft.SharePoint.SPException: <Error><CompilerError Line=”-1″ Column=”-1″ Text=”Type System.CodeDom.CodeBinaryOperatorExpression is not marked as authorized in the application configuration file.” /><CompilerError Line=”-1″ Column=”-1″ Text=”Type System.CodeDom.CodeBinaryOperatorExpression is not marked as authorized in the application configuration file.” /><CompilerError Line=”-1″ Column=”-1″ Text=”Type System.CodeDom.CodeBinaryOperatorExpression is not marked as authorized in the application configuration file.” /><CompilerError Line=”-1″ Column=”-1″ Text=”Type System.CodeDom.CodeBinaryOperatorExpression is not marked as authorized in the application configuration file.” /><CompilerError Line=”-1″ Column=”-1″ Text=”Type System.CodeDom.CodeBinaryOperatorExpression is not marked as authorized in the application configuration file.” /><CompilerError Line=”-1″ Column=”-1″ Text=”Type System.CodeDom.CodeBinaryOperatorExpression is not marked as authorized in the application configuration file.” /><CompilerError Line=”-1″ Column=”-1″ Text=”Type System.CodeDom.CodeBinaryOperatorExpression is not marked as authorized in the application configuration file.” /><CompilerError Line=”-1″ Column=”-1″…
The error suggest that System.CodeDom.CodeBinaryOperatorExpression is not in the authorized types.
Cause
Workflow Foundation (WF) will only run workflows when all the dependent types and assemblies are authorized in the .NET config file (or added explicitly via code) under this tree:
<configuration>
<System.Workflow.ComponentModel.WorkflowCompiler>
<authorizedTypes>
<targetFx>
However, after the update, the following lines are necessary for SharePoint 2013 and beyond:
Please notice that sometimes SharePoint Timer Service (SPTimerV4) runs workflows. If you notice that the application showing the error is ULS logs in OWSTIMER.EXE, you should also include the authorized types in [SharePoint Hive Folder]\bin\OWSTIMER.EXE.config. The Hive Folder will change by version of SharePoint. For SharePoint 2016, it is normally at c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\16. For 2013, at c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\15.
If you have Nintex workflows you should run like this:
Add-CodeDomAuthorizedType -IncludeNintexWorkflow
To undo the changes, run:
Remove-CodeDomAuthorizedType
The script needs to run only once on any WFE. All web.config files related to SharePoint on all servers will be modified. New web applications created after that will also include the changes. Even if a new WFE is added to the farm, the entries will also be included in web.config. The change is a permanent requirement from now on since the WF patch. You do not need to undo the change before applying the SharePoint patch addressing it.
There is a second script to update OWSTIMER.exe.config. This one should only run if you see the symptoms in ULS logs with process OWSTIMER.EXE. Otherwise, you do not need to update. if you have the problem though, you need to rerun the script if a new machine is added to the farm. No line needs to be uncommented for this one. The script name is:
Microsoft is aware of this issue and patches for SharePoint 2010, 2013 and 2016 are being worked as of 9/17/2018. I will update when we have an ETA. I had confirmation from the product team on 9/18/2018 that this information and solution on this post is in the line with the future patch and it is the recommended action plan until the patch is out. If anything change, I will update the post.
Note 2
Some people using third-party workflows (like Nintex) need to also include this:
SharePoint Stuff 
