Thursday, July 29, 2010

Error copying reusable workflow

Scenario:
SharePoint has reusable workflows newly introduced in SP2010. Using SPD you can also modify existing workflows to fit your requirements.

Today I asked my collegue to work on a task which required to reuse an OOTB workflow. But when she click on 'Copy & Modify' button from the ribbon. She keep getting following errors:

This workflow is readonly. Would you like to make a copy of this workflow to open or edit ?
error1

On saying Yes , you get 'Server could not complete your request.For more specific information, click the Details button.'
error2

Solution:
SharePoint will continue to be popular for its weird error message. As in this case.. no error message :)

One of the reason this can happen is if you are working on a sub-site of site collection.

Switch to RootWeb of the site collection and using SharePoint Designer try copying the Workflow, it will work.

2 comments:

Anonymous,  March 29, 2012 at 8:12 PM  

I thank you for this post. I was indeed trying this on a subsite.

BHo February 23, 2013 at 1:23 AM  

Let's say I can create a workflow from the root site but I want to use it in the subsite. Can I do that? Within my subsite, I have a document library called Approved Document. I want to modify the approval workflow to move the file to the Approved Document under my subsite. I cannot find the Approval Document library in the list within the Approval workflow in the root site because my Approval Document is not under the root site. Any suggestion?
Brian.