Change how a SharePoint Workflow created with SharePoint Designer starts.

When a Workflow is created with Sharepoint Designer a wizard is used, it is one of the selling points, workflows without the need for code.

The first question of the wizard is this:

Which allows you to determine how the workflow should start and its relationship with the list items, that is, if the workflow starts when the item is created, is modified or if it starts manually.

Well the problem is that this screen is never seen again after this step (I never found it), so if there are problems with the workflow startup model you get stuck.

The solution to modify how the workflow starts is to open the file with a text editor (you can use the same one from SPD) as seen here:

then you can modify these lines (deleting them), which will modify how the workflow starts according to which one is deleted.

<Association
ListID=”{A245AE99-E68F-4500-9B36-6DD167FF676F}”
TaskListID=”{EAE51F29-83F8-4C88-8A36-D9417969E07C}”
StartManually=”true” ‘Workflow arranca manual
StartOnCreate=”true” ‘Workflow arranca cuando se crea el item
StartOnChange=”true” ‘Workflow arranca cuando se cambia el item.
>

Now, everything has a reason, the reason I was faced with this was that I created a Workflow, I set it to start automatically and nothing happened, it never started, so I had to change it to manual start and one thing led to another…, this was the solution.

Now today I have found that the reason I could not start my workflow automatically has to do with SP1 of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. As indicated here. ( in Spanish in this good Sharepoint blog)

Juan Carlos Peláez

Software Architect.

Keywords: Sharepoint, MOSS2007, WSS3.0, Workflows, Declarative Workflows, Sharepoint Designer, SP1, Juan Carlos Peláez.