Is there a way to manually step back workflow?

Question

Hi,

I am using SPD to design workflow. Can anybody tell me if there is a way to manually step back workflow? For instance, one user mistakenly approve the workflow and when he finds out it is wrong, he will come to administrator to ask for canceling his action and being able to let him redo it. My question is, can this be done in MOSS?

Thanks for your answering.

Answer 1

This is a tricky one. To answer your question, No, you cannot do this with a SPD2007 workflow.
I came across this with one of my clients, what I ended up with is creating a state-machine workflow and after the approval stage there is a checkpoint that asks for admins decision on to move on or not, and if not, then the approval process is restarted.

Now again, this has to be a Visual Studio 2008 Custom SharePoint Workflow .

What I would suggest is creating some form of workflow modification page that will let the admin go in and restart some tasks and have an OnWorkflowChanged State that manages the restart for you.

Hope this helps!

---

Dennis Alzoubi

Answer 2

You can allows a user to restart the entire workflow if you want.  If the user has permissions to terminate and start workflows, he can manually terminate the workflow and restart it.

But as Dennis stated, if you want to be able to just go back 1 step you would need to use a VS workflow

---

Kevin

Answer 3

Hi,

 

You may need to make available a link “Cancel this workflow” and to send a cancel action to the workflow. This is however not straightforward, since you actually need to add a modification form to your workflow. The name of this modification form would be “Cancel this workflow”. You’d then need an EnableWorkflowModification section in your workflow to allow modifications and handle the cancel event. When this event is trapped, you simply complete the workflow (after doing your custom actions).

 

You can see how the OOB workflow “Collect Sigantures” has been implemented, and in particular have a look at its “Signatures.xml” file (in “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server

extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\SignaturesWorkflow”) to have a better picture of this.

 

For more information about cancel event in workflow, please refer to the following article:

 

Terminate this workflow

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointworkflow/thread/9b11ef73-50e0-4233-b288-17b958a0474f/

 

Building and Distributing Workflows in SharePoint Products and Technologies for Use in Customer and Partner Environments

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc511934.aspx

 

Hope this helps.

 

Rock Wang

---

Rock Wang– MSFT