WebGuru’s Blog about Digital Life

Challenge:

When I was approached by a co-worker to come up a quick solution to design a training registration application. The requirement is to display all upcoming training events in calendar view and allow users to register to each training. And upon the registration is submitted, the training department and the user’s supervisor should receive notifications immediately (although not required now, but might need the approval from the supervisor in later development). The deadline is very…, how to say it, … how about this afternoon. Well, while the co-worker asked how to design the database tables and asp.net coding, I suggested why not giving the SharePoint a shot. Since I am the one proposed, then I had to create it for her.

Well, that was what I came up so far. In our Microsoft Office SharePoint Server System (MOSS) 2007 with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS), I created a calendar list to display training events; in the calendar item there was a link to another new created survey list acting as a registration form. Then I added a workflow to the survey so that emails will be sent out whenever a new response is added into the survey (or register list).

Everything is working fine, but however, the workflow does not start. Instead, the status of the workflow appears as Failed to Start.

Trouble-Shootings:

I searched this issue on Google, and I found out a lot of people had the similar errors before. Someone pointed out the cause was the user of application pool who should be Network Services instead of a user with administrative right; Someone suggested to re-active the workflow feature in SharePoint Application server; Someone asked whether it was done in SharePoint Designer  2007.

I tried every suggestion I could find, but no success at the end. I even used the SharePoint Designer to re-create another workflow, but got the same Failed to Start error. When I launched the workflow .aspx from the designer and browser it directly, I could have a Start button. But another error of The data source control failed to execute the insert command came up after I clicked the submit button.

I almost gave up since it was too time consumption for this trouble shooting, and I nearly crashed my SharePoint server with another suggestion (run stsadm command) . Right before I stopped solution searching, I found the real cause from Microsoft support site to my particular situation. And the truth is

…… because starting a workflow from a survey response is not supported in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Although the Workflows option appears when you click the arrow next to a survey response, you cannot start a workflow from a survey response.

…..

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

Solution:

Well, although I did not get the fix, I at least saved my time to play with workflow in survey list again.

Based on it, in this training registration issue, I decided not to use survey list. Instead I create a Custom List to act like a registration form to collect information from users. And after I added Workflow to this new created custom list, and then add a new item into the list. You know what, I got email notification generated by the workflow now.

Referred link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926370