How to Troubleshoot Your Workflows

  • Article

This is the third of a four part series on common workflow administration tasks associated with Project Server 2010. 

Installation and setup of Project Server 2010 is covered in the overall setup guide, and these articles will make the assumption that the user has already read and completed the setup of Project Server 2010.

These articles also will not cover the topic of creating Project Server 2010 workflows. Please refer to our SDK articles to find out more information on how to create our workflows.

How to Troubleshoot Your Workflows

Check the workflow status page

  1. There are two different ways to do this based on your need
    1. Check from within the project
      • Open a project with a failing workflow
      • Go to the Stage Status Page (This is the very first page from within a workflow stage)
      • From within the workflow Status page expand the “All Workflow Stages” section
        • Workflow Status
      • Click on the “Additional Workflow Data” link, which is round at the bottom right.
        • Additional Workflow Data
    2. If your project cannot be opened, you can also get to this page by:
      • Site Actions, View All Site Content
        • View All Site Content
      • Click on “Site Workflows”
        • Site Workflows
      • Click on “Show All Workflows” link
      • Find the workflow which you are concerned about.
      • Once you have opened the workflow status page you can investigate the workflow history to see what the workflow was doing before it began to error.
        • Workflow History

View the ULS logs

  1. ULS logs can be found in: “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS” 
    • Suggestion:  Create a desktop shortcut on the server to this location.
  2. Logs will be broken up into pieces. Find the log with a time stamp as close to the time you are most concerned about, and open it.
  3. Some key words to look for when going through the logs are:
    • Sharepoint foundation
    • Startworkflow
    • Winwf
    • entering...activity
    • leaving... activity

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