Thursday, June 7, 2007

SharePoint Designer Deployment Issues #2

Hya all...

as time go by I encountered another annoying issue with working with SharePoint Designer and creating WSS site template.

What I had to do is define several workflows in a template site and replicate that site using an STP template file.

Apparently that every change you make to the workflow in the designer advances its version number in one of the XML files on the workflow, and when that happens you will get an error whenever you start a workflow on any site created from that template.

I found a workaround for that, opening the workflow and clicking "finish" solved that error, but to do that on every site I created on automation? I don't think so.

Well, the guys at Microsoft were kind enough to find a more usable solution for that. Apparently all I have to do before I save the site as a template is to reset the version number to 1:
· Open the .wfconfig.xml file for every workflow in your ‘workflows’ folder
· Edit the ‘RulesVersion’ attribute to have a value of “V1.0”
· Deploy the site template

(With thanks to Jordan Hull)

This seems to solve the problem for good and not all workflows are working as I expected!

Hooray!

3 comments:

Amitsam said...

I also tried workaround solution.
but in my case in production environment designer is not allowed.
after deployment in production environment site workflow association get lost.

If you have any solution please let me know

Anonymous said...

Woohoo, nice one. Typical Microsoft and their 'features'! This solution has saved me the hastle of learning Visual Studio 2008!

ra said...

Hey Shai, thanks for the tips. So you're developing a site template that contains workflows as well, and deploying that...ok... then if your client requires updates to these workflows, how do you go about that?