Saturday, January 14, 2012

SharePoint designer workflow activity: Set content approval status

SharePoint 2007 provides document library with a content approval mechanism, useful for document versioning, approval before publishing content publically. Although lacks in assigning task and sending notifications to approvers. Also defining alerts on the custom views using Approval Status column is not possible here.
The simple alternative was to build a SharePoint Designer workflow. One of the activity needed was to change one of the custom properties and set the Approval status to “Pending” after collection data on completion of task from approver.
And the action activities flow used was
1. Check out current item
2. Set custom properties fields with variables
3. Check in current item with comments
4. Set content approval status to Pending

Although all steps are logically correct, workflow yielded in Error.
After googling for some time, came to forum link providing solution. After adding a delay of 1 minute it started working fine.
New activities flow is
1. Check out current item
2. Set custom properties fields with variables
3. Check in current item with comments
4. Pause for duration 1 minute
5. Set content approval status to Pending

1 comment:

Nick Kharchenko said...

There is a new solution that expand SharePoint Workflow possibilities: HarePoint Workflow Extensions for SharePoint. It includes about 200 new activities and 30 of them are free:
http://www.harepoint.com/Products/HarePointWorkflowExtensions/