Change or Restart Workflow and Skip to Workflow

Question

You have the option in server settings to "Restart current workflow for the selected projects", with the choices of skipping to current workflow stage or to a particular workflow stage. Using a new 2013 project server workflow neither of these
choices work. The project in each case is returned to the very first workflow stage.
Is this a bug or badly designed workflow?
Is this also the case with legacy 2010 workflows?
rgds
Mike
Mike Mahoney

Answer 1

Mike,
Thanks to John on the Product Team, I think I can explain what is going on.
I am going to assume you have a workflow similar to the one below? Some simple logic, a wait event and a transition or some type.
As the workflow progresses in the above case, it will log a message out, then wait for the submit button to be pressed before transitioning.  If you try to use the Change / Restart workflow function and choose Restart  > Skip to Stage 3, what
you will see is the workflow restart, log Stage 1 to the history list, and then wait for input. There is no skipping through as the workflow is waiting for the event.
The new workflows, whilst allowing looping etc, are essentially still sequential in nature, so to skip though the various stages, they need to start at the beginning and then progress through the stages depending on the logic in the stage transitions.
Just like in 2010, to get something to progress, you need to introduce some special 'Skip to Stage' logic (for want of a better phrase), with this logic, you can tell the workflow 'If the workflow is being run normally, or restarts the workflow and includes
this stage' execute the actions within. This is achieved by using the 'Include Stage' condition I mentioned in a post above.  In the example below, I have wrapped the logging and the Wait for submitted event in an 'Include Stage' action (and added
some extra logging)
Now when this workflow runs normally, it will go through and execute everything, including the bits inside the 'Include Stage' action because the workflow was started normally (as in the name). 
However, if I choose to restart > Skip to Stage 3 for instance, the workflow will realise it is in 'Skip to Stage' mode and not execute anything in the 'Include Stage' action as the workflow is not being run normally, nor is that stage included (we
are skipping to Stage 3). As the Wait for Submit is not executed, the workflow will not wait for the submit button to be pressed and progress without issue to the desired stage. From a logging perspective, you should see something like 'Stage 1 > Leaving
Stage 1 > Stage 2 > Leaving Stage 2 > Stage 3 > Included Stage 3.
It took some time, but I hope that explains what your seeing. If it doesn't, well it does give a good overview of how to use Skip to Stage logic in 2013 workflows.
Alex Burton
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