Skip to main content
Nintex Community Menu Bar

Scheduled workflows canceled by System Account, error "failed to start"

  • January 9, 2020
  • 6 replies
  • 342 views
I
Forum|alt.badge.img+1

I took over as admin of my department's SharePoint 2016 site at the beginning of the year. I edited a site workflow to add a few more individuals to the notification email that goes out. Up until that point, the workflow ran as scheduled. Ever since I made that edit, the workflow cancels and errors out. I get two notification emails. One states that the workflow was canceled by System Account and a 2nd email states that the workflow errored, "Failed to start". To test this, I built a workflow that just sends a notification email to me. There are no other parameters in the workflow. If I run it manually, the notification goes out. But if I schedule it, I get the two emails I specified above. I had one of my peers do the same thing and get the exact same results.

 

Is it possible there are permissions somewhere specifically affecting the ability to have scheduled workflows run? I've googled this and find a few results but they all link to a "fix" articel from a few years ago with instructions on clearing the designer cache on SP2010/2013 but nothing on 2016 and I can't find a way to do that based on the instructions provided. Any help is appreciated.

    6 replies

    E
    Forum|alt.badge.img+17
    • eharris04
    • January 9, 2020

    @irish_nate welcome aboard and happy new year. Sorry you're experiencing some difficulties. 

     

    You could attempt to restore the workflow to a previous version to see if something weird happened. Out side of that and I hate tossing people over to support and not helping them here, but head over to customer.nintex.com and submit a case there.

    I
    Forum|alt.badge.img+1
    • irish_nate
    • Author
    • January 9, 2020

    @eharris04 Thanks for the reply! I haven't restored previous versions since I overwrote them with the updated workflow. But I created new workflows and had two peers (including the old admin/site creator who had scheduled workflows working fine until 1/1/20) do the same and all three of us have started them manually and they run as expected. But when scheduling them, we all get the same errors. It's a super fun problem so far! Love being pioneers! lol

    E
    Forum|alt.badge.img+17
    • eharris04
    • January 9, 2020

    Something odd....  yea head to customer.nintex.com and submit a ticket. I'll ping a few folks as well and see who gets your a response the quickest.

    Simon Muntz
    Nintex Partner
    Forum|alt.badge.img+23
    • Simon MuntzNintex Partner
    • Nintex Partner
    • January 9, 2020
    When running a workflow manually it runs in the SharePoint Web Application service. When a schedule runs the workflow it is runing in the Workflow Timer service.
    The issue is most likely with the timer service.
    Looking at the ULS logs should provide more information.
    You could try restarting the timer service.
    We provide Nintex Training & Consulting - https://www.definiti.com.au/
    M
    Forum|alt.badge.img+1
    • Menu
    • March 2, 2020

     I am running with same issue...I was wondering if you resolved the issue? thank you 

    D
    Forum|alt.badge.img+1

    I experienced the same issue this past weekend.  I patched our production farms this weekend with the December 2024 cumulative update for SP2016 and every single one of our farms started failing on scheduled Nintex workflows.  We could manually run them but the scheduled ones “failed to start” and were “canceled by system” account.   I contacted support and he had me delete all entries in the <System.Workflow.ComponentModel.WorkflowCompiler> section of the C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\16\BIN\OWSTIMER.EXE.CONFIG file on the server that was processing the “Nintex Workflow Scheduler” timer job.

    I was told that deleting all the entries would force the timer service to revert to the web.config for the corresponding webapp.  As I was not keen on deleting 240+ lines from the OWSTIMER.EXE.CONFIG as I couldn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t break other timer jobs.  We have a very large number of custom solutions in our Farm.  In any case I compared the Web.config to OWSTIMER.EXE.CONFIG and found that if I added the line below to the OWSTIMER.EXE.CONFIG that things started working again.

    <authorizedType Assembly="Nintex.Workflow, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=913f6bae0ca5ae12" Namespace="Nintex.Workflow.*" TypeName="*" Authorized="True" />

     

    I added this as the line just before the closing </targetFx> tag in the <System.Workflow.ComponentModel.WorkflowCompiler> section.

     

    I made this change to the OWSTIMER.EXE.CONFIG file on all servers in the farm.  Once making the change, I stopped and restarted the timer service on all servers in the farm and things started working again.  If you encounter one where the timer job doesn’t appear to be processing, make sure that your “Nintex Workflow Start Service” is running in Services.msc.  

     

    This fixed all 7 of our farms, I hope it helps you too.  Many thanks to Nintex Support for helping.

     

    Sidebar Buttons
    Nintex Community Home Contact Nintex Support Email Nintex Community Check Nintex Status
    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement