Symptoms

The original issue was related to Package and Deployment, when we created a package of some Forms, Views and SmartObjects of a SharePoint 2013 list in DEV and tried to deploy it to the QA environment where this SP List already exists but has no K2 artefacts, it would result in a Missing Reference error for the Service Objects and consequently for the SmartObject.

This doesn't really make sense since the Service Objects and SmartObjects don't exist in the target QA environment, however the SharePoint 2013 Site Collection with a List of the same name does exist, so K2 PandD should just create new artefacts based off of this SP List.

We found that only when there's a workflow involved for that specific SP list, then PandD cannot deploy and will throw a missing reference error for the Service Object.
 

Diagnoses

We investigated in a lot of different directions, for example we tried to reproduce this issue on a local VM with the customer's DB installed. We also inspected the workflow in K2 Studio to try and figure out why this workflow doesn't want to be deployed with PandD. We even investigated the possibility of a "catch 22" situation where data was needed from a Lookup Field where no SmartObject existed yet, but eventually we found the problem: There were columns added to the SharePoint list but the K2 SmartObjects weren't updated/refreshed yet.
 

Resolution

So in order to resolve the first deployment issue, all that needed to be done was to edit the SP List in QA and make sure it had exactly the same columns as the list in DEV. After that was checked and done, PandD could successfully deploy the package.

However, a second issue popped up, where PandD couldn't deploy to a different site collection that had a subsite with a list. The steps to resolve that issue was to:

- Delete the existing list
- Create a new list using the same STP (give it a different name)
- Deploy the package
- Change the list name back to the original name

Using the above steps, we were able to successfully deploy the package on the subsite.

There was a third issue that popped up, specifically when deploying a workflow with PandD then during the "Analyze" step the workflow name changes. Apparently this is most likely caused by re-factoring that's happening in the background, which basically means that data is sent to a SharePoint service and a bunch of string manipulation happens then finally gets sent back to PandD. Apparently this approach will change in the future. However, the workflow name that changes in PandD could also be related to the original name that was used in K2 Studio when creating the workflow, then later renamed in K2 Studio and re-deployed.

This can be solved by deploying the package as-is, then later manually renaming the Workflow name by downloading the workflow from K2 Workspace, editing it in K2 Studio (renaming it) and deploying again. A new package can then be created with the new name in place.