Stuart Roberts on all things SharePoint

If you’re writing a workflow and are using the CreateTask or CreateTaskWithContentType activities you may come across the following error:

System.InvalidOperationException: Correlation value on declaration “Name of your token” is already initialized

When adding a token to the create task activity you will more than likely have set the OwnerActivityName property of CorrelationToken to the workflow itself.

The create task activity (and subsequent OnTaskCreated, OnTaskChanged and CompleteTask activities) should be contained within a Sequence activity (or a child type) and it is this that should be used for the OwnerActivityName property.

Ensure that all task activities contained in your sequence block use the same correlation token definition.

I was trying to update a URL field of a task within a custom workflow I was writing and spent a bit more time than I’d have liked trying to get the URL and description to save correctly in the task item being created as part of the CreateTaskWithContentType activity.

Obviously you can’t save a SPFieldUrlValue as an object directly against the ExtendedProperties as it is not a simple type, such as a string or an integer. Nearly every other field provided with SharePoint that contains multiple values is separated by the #; characters. The URL field is different in that it uses the comma as the separator. I knew this and set the extended property to something like:

TaskProperties.ExtendedProperties[guidIdOfField] = "http://somewebaddress,Description";

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Trying to use the Delay Activity workflow activity in a SharePoint workflow and having problems with it firing?

For SharePoint 2010, the delay activity will only be checked if it has completed the configured delay every time the Workflow timer job itself fires. By default this is set to run every five minutes. So, if like me you are trying to setup a delay of one minute and were trying to figure out why it wasn’t firing in time, this might help to explain why.

Workflow Timer Job Setting

Some other posts mention running the stsadm command:
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