C's SharePoint Collective: September 2011

24 September 2011

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire

I’m speaking at the New Hampshire SharePoint Saturday event on 9/24 with my friend Jason Himmelstein. We will be presenting our famous Heavy Metal Power Pivot session. If you’re in the area, we’d love to see you so come on over and say hi!

Cheers
C

01 September 2011

How do I – Remove all traces of a Workflow from my SharePoint list?

Sometimes when we are working with SharePoint Designer (SPD) workflows on SharePoint lists, things can get a little ugly. SharePoint preserves every version of the workflow unless you manually go and remove it from the list settings. If you have a workflow that happens to keep in a running loop, it could appear as if the newly published workflow didn’t actually publish correctly. In such situations, it’s often better to “reboot” and publish fresh. What we would do is to remove every instance of our workflow from the list settings and then re-publish the workflow again from SPD. Here’s how:

Start by navigating to the list on which the workflow was published.
In the ribbon, switch to the “Library” tab.
Once on the “Library” tab, you can click the “Workflow Settings” button, but because the ribbon dynamically changes depending on browser size and screen resolution, that button may not always be displayed. A sure way to get there is to click the “Library Settings” button which is always displayed.
From the Library Settings page, under “Permissions and Management”, click the “Workflow Settings” link.
You’ll now be presented with a long list of historic versions of the workflow.
Click the “Remove a workflow” link below the historic list.
On the right, select the “Remove” radio button for every instance of the workflow.
Once all the buttons are selected, click the “OK” button to completely remove our workflow from the list.
Now simply switch back to SPD and re-publish the workflow for a fresh start.