SP 2010: When trying to ‘reassign’ or ‘request change’ on Workflow it does not set original task as complete or create another task.

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Problem: Customer had a site that was migrated from MOSS 2007 to SP 2010, when they would try to ‘request change’ or ‘reassign’ a workflow, it would not set original task as complete and create another task as expected.

Troubleshooting:

  • tested other workflows within the site collection, this problem seemed to be specific to this list
  • We found that the lists that had working workflows had a field called ‘Status’, whereas the one not working had a field called ‘Task Status’
  • Created new list and new approval workflow but that workflow had a field called ‘Status’ as expected so something was definitely not right with problem workflow. ‘Task Status’ is a field we see when a Project Tasks list is created which a SharePoint workflow does not like as its Task list because of the ‘Task Status’ field
  • Found this great link on the subject: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneralprevious/thread/cb3ac6b2-e610-4673-b8b5-1020bd25043b

Resolution: Since this problem only existed on this one specific list and I could not reproduce, I figured something is corrupted on this specific list. Just like the social.technet.microsoft.com link above states, I verified that a similar case was resolved by deactivating and activating the following features:

We ran the following stsadm commands on the site collection in the given order to reprovision the task content type.
stsadm -o deactivatefeature -filename "Fields\feature.xml" -force -url "https://Server/sites/siteCollection"
stsadm -o deactivatefeature -filename "CTypes\feature.xml" -force -url "https://Server/sites/siteCollection"
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename "CTypes\feature.xml" -force -url "https://Server/sites/siteCollection"
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename "Fields\feature.xml" -force -url "https://Server/sites/siteCollection"

Then we created a new task list and voila…it had the Status field as expected.

Fight Comparison:

George “The Animal’ Steele vs. Macho Man Savage…the Macho Man used whatever means he could to defeat The Animal.