Friday, December 11, 2009

Failed on Start (retrying) status in workflow

This is an error that appears in workflow status when the workflow fails to start.
We should not always blame the Windows Workflow Framework thinking that it could be due to it.
Atleast in my case, every time it happened due to program errors.
In our SharePoint environment, in most cases, it occured due to unmatched assembly name, public key token or version in the workflow.xml or whatever element file we included with the sharepoint feature.
Few times it occured due to wrong end points in the rules.xml file as well.

So if the assembly info is all correct, check to make sure that the WCF end points / class names are all correct if using WCF service(s) with Workflow

REF: http://blogs.msdn.com/wael/archive/2008/01/11/workflow-failed-on-start-retrying.aspx