SharePoint Designer Workflows, Tasks, and the Annoying “Access Denied” Error
As most of you know, I try to avoid SharePoint Designer like that creepy distant relative at family reunions who always gives you the heebie-jeebies. But lately we’ve had some clients who insist on doing everything "out of the box", so I’ve had to grit my teeth and, with great trepidation, fire up ye old SPD for some simple workflow creation.
For the most part, SPD workflows are fairly innocuous, with the most pain coming from beating your head against the wall trying to make it do something simple in seventeen steps that you could do with three lines of code in Visual Studio. That being said, there are some real annoying bugs that crop up from time to time, like this one: I create and deploy a workflow as the System Account but users can’t edit their own tasks in the Tasks list. They get an "Access Denied" error whenever they try to edit the task (which, being an SPD-generated task, opens a custom .aspx page instead of the standard editform.aspx page). After some intense LiveSearching, I found a post from Paul Galvin on this issue. From where I stand, this definitely looks like a bug but I can’t confirm whether it’s version dependent (pre-SP1, post-SP1, etc.) because all the machines I’m testing on are patched to at least the Infrastructure Update level.
Unfortunately, Paul’s workaround method (saving the workflow locally) didn’t work for me – the ‘Save As…’ options were all greyed out. After futzing with it a bit, I tried something different – I checked the workflow out, then checked it back in (right-click the workflow folder in SPD, Check-Out/Check-In). Voila! Users can now edit their own tasks. Bizarre. It’s worth noting that this only happened for me on workflows that were created by the System Account – regular users with Site Owner permissions did not experience this problem (your mileage may vary).
Now, if I could only go back to doing workflows the *right* way (that is, in Visual Studio instead of SPD), my day would be made…
I just wanted to say thanks for posting this information. I was having the exact same issue, and had played with the permissions but with no success. After checking the workflow out and back in, it magically started working. Thanks Again.
Cool Stuff
All the steps are clearly mentioned.
Thanks
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sdkjfdjf
I think you just saved my mind…
I think you just saved my mind…
after beating my head on my desk for 2 hours
worked here too, after 3 h of headbanging…
AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
For real? What kind of oddball random “i’d never find it in a million years’ problem is this? *sigh* such is the life of a SharePointer, eh?
Thanks a million.
Guys, thanks for the solution!
Hi, i created a form that has to be filled in by an initiator on sharepoint but some colums i want to be greyed so that only me can change them. How do i do that?
This problem has been a thorn in our side for well over a month. We found many articles pointing to simply checking out the workflow in SPD and back in. That never worked for us. Savings all of the xml and aspx pages associated with the workflow did the trick though.
Thanks!
An hour on the phone with the client trying everything I could think of, and this was the solution.
Thanks so much!
You saved my 1000 hrs
Thanks A Lot!!!
I’ve been going nuts trying to understand the reason why a Task created in SP is editable by a user, while another task in the same list and with the same exact permissions gives the ole “Access Denied” when the same user tries to edit it.
Reason? The task giving the error was created by a SPDesigner workflow, which was created before that user was granted rights.
The Check In, Check out worked like a charm I did this in SP Designer. I was searching for hrs for a solution 🙂
Man that bug is just ridiculous. I’m glad i found your post though, this stuff was driving me crazy
This helped me so much!!!!
Hi, I encountered the same problem here, seems SP didn’t fix this bug in so many years! But i cannot find (right-click the workflow folder in SPD, Check-Out/Check-In) in SPD2010, could you please grand more advice on doing this? Thanks!