SharePoint 2013: SPD 2013 Workflows are getting associated with the list but they aren’t starting

On a SharePoint 2013 farm, any SPD 2013 workflow is not starting. It gets associated with the list properly. The issue was specific to a site collection and will happen on all lists within this site collection. The issue is not reproducible in subsite or other site collection. We would not see any relevant errors in ULS logs. The workflows would just not run.

So what is the cause if this

We found that the site had duplicate scopes and both were in active state.

ScopeID	ParentID	Path	Status	HasTopic	Created	LastModified	LastRevised
5EE37998-51CA-5ACB-D1CA-9FE0DBA962C5	76D6AE7B-219C-4884-225E-66CB5E6B75E9	/SharePoint/default/b18990d9-002d-4a7f-97cf-8d00872645f0/7815df63-43b2-429d-a295-bbc664d4f6ce	Active	1	22:55.8	40:32.8	16:36.8
5EE37998-51CA-5ACB-D1CA-9FE0DBA962C5	76D6AE7B-219C-4884-225E-66CB5E6B75E9	/SharePoint/default/b18990d9-002d-4a7f-97cf-8d00872645f0/7815df63-43b2-429d-a295-bbc664d4f6ce	Active	1	22:55.8	40:32.8	16:36.8

 

There were 2 rows with same path/ScopeID and the date created/modified were also identical.

Resolution

Delete the existing scope for this site of you know the ScopeURi used to create Scope or create another scope with a new Scope name using:

Register-SPWorkflowService -SPSite “https://siteurl" -WorkflowHostUri "https://workflow.servername.fqdn:12290" -scopename "SCOPENew"

We will need to republish the workflows after the new scope has been set.

Some information on Scopes

Scopes Could be found in dbo.scopes table of WFResourceManagementDB. Scopes are set first time when we publish workflows from SharePoint Designer for the site. Two Workflows can share same scope if they are published to same site. The Path column for scope is set as “/SharePoint/default/<GUID-of-Root-SiteCollection/<Guid-of-SPWeb> and so on. More information on scopes could be found here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj163181.aspx

 

Post By: Divya Agarwal [MSFT]