Unstoppable Workflows :)

Question

Hi,

I have some weird occurrences in my SharePoint farm. I have a couple of workflows that run on SharePoint items. Now the workflows do what they are supposed to do and work fine. But, some instances on random items do not finish. However, the workflows complete their job as defined in the designer. And slowly this builds up workflow instances running at any given time which I believe will turn into a problem in the future.

So to fix it, I tried GUI "stop this workflow" with no success. And I have also tried force stopping them through PowerShell to no avail.

Any idea why this might be happening? Not recently but a couple of weeks ago I tried to look for logs, tried to check differences between instances that run normally and ones that get "stuck" but I couldn't make much sense of what I found then. I also did google my problem but couldn't find similar posts on the interwebs.

Any help towards identifying the problem and, hopefully to a solution is much appreciated

Answer 1

Hi @Harun Kara ,

This may be because the workflow is working on an item, and the priority of the running state is higher than the priority of stopping the workflow. Therefore, you cannot enforce stop the workflow.

To fix this issue, please remove the scope which holds that workflow.

• Remove the scope from the dbo.Scopes table of the WFResourceManagementDB Database
  
• Restart ServiceBus Gateway and Broker services
• Create scope programmatically.
• Publish workflow again

Note: This will cause all running instances of the workflow to fail!

Thanks,
Echo Du

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Updated Answer -------------------------------------

Hi @Harun Kara ,

Before removing the workflow scopes, you should back it up.

Here is the PowerShell script to backup Database from SQL Server:

#Import SQL PowerShell module  
Import-Module SQLPS –DisableNameChecking  
#Configuration parameters  
$SQLInstance="Cre-SQL-001"  
$BackupPath="D:\Backup\"  
#Array of Database names, Comma separated  
$DBName="WFResourceManagementDB"  
#Backup Database  
Write-host "Backing up the database: $($DBName)"  
Backup-SqlDatabase -ServerInstance $SQLInstance -Database $DBName -BackupFile "$($BackupPath)\$($DBName).bak"  

Use the "Restore-WFScope" cmdlet to restore a previously backed-up Workflows scope.

Syntax:

Parameter Set: Default  
Restore-WFScope -BackupInstanceDBConnectionString <String> -BackupResourceDBConnectionString <String> -BackupSBGatewayDBConnectionString <String> -BackupSBMessageContainerConnectionString <String[]> -InstanceStateSyncTime <DateTime> -LiveInstanceDBConnectionString <String> -LiveResourceDBConnectionString <String> -ScopePath <String> [-AbortOnError] [-LiveSiteEncryptedEncryptionToken <String> ] [-LiveSiteEncryptionCertificate <X509Certificate2> ] [-LiveSiteEncryptionToken <String> ] [ <CommonParameters>]  

Run Restore-WFScope to restore a previously backed-up Workflows scope. It provides the ability to help customers recover from unexpected deletions of scopes that need recovery using a backup.

• More information, please refer to Restore-WFScope .

Thanks,
Echo Du

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Answer 2

Hi @Echo Du_MSFT ,
How can I create the scope programmatically? I believe I do it through PowerShell? Can you steer me towards the command pages? Thank you.