Thursday, February 27, 2014

SharePoint 2010 vs 2013 Workflow Inconsistencies

These days I was tearing my hair out. I am rewriting some old workflows on my SharePoint system and can't decide whether to use v 2010 or 2013 workflows. There are definitely some useful features in the 2013 workflows but there are also some very basic features missing.

Here they are:

There is no impersonation step


This is somewhat understandable. Impersonation step in unreliable because when the employee who deployed the workflow leaves the company and the AD user is removed, the workflow will fail to start.


Cannot set permission on items


There is no way to replace permission on items. This was very useful in some cases.


Lookup Field - Additional Fields


Consider having a Lookup field linked to another list that is retrieving some additional columns. For example the Title is the main column, and you also retrieve the ID and Status fields. In 2010 you can work with these additional columns, but in 2013 only the main Lookup column is showing up.

In 2010 Workflow:

In 2013 Workflow:


This is crazy. Yes, you could retrieve the ID as the main column instead, then do a Lookup on the other list in the workflow. But in this case the New Item form shows a dropdown with some numbers instead the lookup field of your choice. Here you can use InfoPath to customize - which is retiring.


There is no Else-If


Serously??
Even the Else branch is missing from the auto-complete.


Wait for field to not equal a value


In 2010 Workflow you have all the options:

In 2013 Workflow there is only the Equal:







Start List/Site Workflow



Via a 2013 WF you can only start a v2010 workflow. Wtf??








That's it for now... I'll update this post once I find some more annoyances.