Workflow
history is one of two things to SharePoint users. I suspect for the
majority, they aren't even aware of it, and don't have any need for it.
For a small minority, they are fully aware of it for one important
reason – compliance. Workflows are nearly always used as part of a
larger business process, and often these business processes require
auditing to ensure compliance with whatever industry standard the
business operates with. When SharePoint workflows are used, workflow
history is usually seized upon by users as being an easy way to audit
compliance. After all, it's easy to get at isn't it?
Certainly while the workflow is in progress, and for a couple of
months afterwards it is. But what happens when the end of year audit
arrives, and the auditor goes to look at the history for a workflow
completed 11 months ago? Disaster – it's not there! There must have been
many a frantic phone call between panicking compliance officers and
frustrated IT staff along the lines of this:
- [Compliance officer] "My workflow history has been deleted! The auditor is going to fail us! Where has it gone?"
- [IT support] (probably after Googling "Workflow history
deleted") "This is by design. SharePoint deletes workflow history after
60 days"
- [Compliance officer] "WHAT?! Nobody told me that! Can you recover it?"
- [IT support] "We can, we'll just need turn off the timer job and
then restore the entire SharePoint farm for each month in question."
- [Compliance officer] "How long will that take?"
- [IT support] "Hmmm…."
Both parties are at fault here. The compliance officer for writing a
feature of SharePoint into the compliance process without knowing how it
worked, and IT for not explaining the 60 day "deletion" actually
happens. The good news is though, workflow history isn't deleted, all we
need to do is make it easier to find.
So Where Is Workflow History after 60 days?
Put simply, it's in the same place as it's always been. There's a
hidden list in every SharePoint site with the workflow feature activated
called "workflow history" and it's under lists, so pointing your
browser at http://[sitename]/[subweb]/lists/workflow%20history/ will
show you this list. It's not pretty, and certainly not usable by an end
user in its default view, but it is the same content that was available
from the item that the original workflow ran on. All that happens after a
workflow has been closed for 60 days is that the relationship links
between the item (list item or document) and the workflow history are
removed from the database by a timer job. The reason this is done is
that a workflow can consist of many individual steps, each of which gets
recorded in the history list. Maintaining those links in the database
for every workflow that ever runs in a site slows performance down. So
Microsoft implemented a clean-up job to remove the links, making it
appear from the item that the workflow history is gone. It's possible to
disable the timer job, but this has to be done at the application
level, will kill performance in the long term, and doesn't help you get
back the "missing" workflow history.
Making Workflow History Usable Again
Knowing that all Workflow History is available in a
list, all we need to do is link it back to the original item using a
calculated column and a view. The basic steps are:
- Create a view of the workflow history list that uses the
filtered ID to present the history of a particular workflow in a
recognisable format.
- Create a new calculated column in the list or library that is associated with the workflow.
- Write a formula in the calculated column that inserts the
item/document ID into a link that can be passed to a view of the
workflow history list.
Once we've completed these steps, any user who can open the item will
be able to see the new link to the workflow history and view that. Now
for the nitty gritty:
Create views of the Workflow History List
- Open the workflow history list at http://appname/subweb/workflow%20history/
- Create a new shared view; you'll need one for each list that has a
workflow associated with it – if there's only one, call the new view
"audit view", otherwise "workflow name – audit view" or something similar.
- You'll need to identify the List or Library ID (GUID) – You can use the full history list for this.
As a minimum, add the following columns to the view:
Date Occurred
User ID
Event Type
Outcome
Description - Sort the view by "Date Occurred"
- Filter the view by "List ID" (List ID is equal to GUID – include the braces)
- Group by "Primary Item ID", then by "Workflow History Parent Instance"
- Save the view, try it out – add any other customisations your audit process may need.
At this point the view will return all history for a particular list,
in the next steps we'll create a link that opens and filters workflow
history for a particular item.
Create the calculated column for a list/library
- Within the list that is associated with the workflow, add a new
calculated column. Do this for each list from which you need to see the
workflow history.
Enter the following formula, replacing appname and subweb with the address of your site, and viewname with the view you just created:
=CONCATENATE("http://appname/subweb/Lists/Workflow%20History/viewname.aspx?&FilterField1=Item&FilterValue1=",ID) - Add this column to the default view, or create an "auditor's view"
of the list, containing this column and any other pertinent information.
- Now users can click on the link created dynamically by this column
to return a filtered view of the workflow history, containing audit
information on each step in every workflow that ran for this list item.
Make the workflow history easier to read
Out of the box, the workflow history contains a lot of GUIDs instead
of real names (I suppose this is where deleting all those links made
sense to Microsoft). To make it more human legible, you can add further
calculated columns to the workflow history list to turn some of those
column values back into real names. A good example is the workflow name,
which is represented by "workflow association ID"
- Add a new calculated column called "Workflow name" to the workflow history list.
Use the following formula:
=IF([Workflow Association ID]="{GUID of particular workflow}", "Name of particular workflow",IF([Workflow Association ID]="{GUID of another particular workflow}", "Name of another particular workflow")) - Now save and add this column to your workflow audit views.
That's all. It's clearly not as straightforward as being able to use
the OOTB workflow history from the item, but if it means you can still
access the same information anytime without harming the performance of
the database, it's definitely worth doing! If you know you're going to
need workflow history for multiple sites, it's probably worth adding the
views at least to the site template before the sites are created, and
you could even add the columns to the default libraries with some
placeholder values to aid deployment.
