Hi David,

in general you should first see what elements get written to workflow history. Usually you can reduce diagnostic logging to workflow history list after a workflow is ready to publish and working.

Second tip is to have separate workflow history lists for several workflows set up in workflow settings of each workflow. Usually I have one workflow history list for each large workflow and a shared history list for a couple small workflows.

In the end you can still purge workflow history list data by going to site settings -> Manage workflow history lists.

There you can select a history list and hit purge items.

In the dialog that gets opened you can specify a filter for items to be purged or purge everything.

Hope this helps a bit.

Best regards

Enrico

So are you suggesting I may not need WorkflowHistory, but I should plan well my Workflow History List(s) ?  Last question relative to the purge - it will allow me to purge > 5,000

Hi David,

if Workflow History is useful or not depends what you write to it. I only know from my personal working habits that while in development of a new workflow I write a lot of stuff to the history to see if my workflow is working as expected. When finished most of the data is not useful to anyone so I remove or disable those actions to free workflow history from my stuff.

As not only explicitely written messages go to history but also every action that has been run and finished it's always a good idea to have several history lists for each large workflow. There is a really good writing about this concept that can be found here:  

Hope this helps.

Best regards

Enrico

Hi Enrico,

Thanks for the link.  I will read.  In your second paragraph you said "As not only explicitly written messages go to history but also every action that has been run and finished it's always a good idea to have several history lists for each large workflow."  It makes sense to have several WF lists, but for you these several list would only be maintained during test ?

Hi David,

no I do use the workflow history list. I just reduce the usage after a workflow is ready for production. When coming to this stage I remove all debug info I might have added to my workflow, any logs for looping steps and so on and just let important information be logged like why a decision evaluated to true or stuff like this but this heavily depends on the workflows scenario.

Best regards

Enrico