WF Intermittently Failing. "Error in request approval action. Unauthorized attempt to update..."

  • 24 June 2019
  • 4 replies
  • 95 views
M
Badge +2

Hi Everyone,

 

I have a workflow that works and fails sporadically, with no changes in between. It is failing in and around the Lazy Approval reply (Using accepted term on server).

Full error message:

"Error in request approval action. Unauthorized attempt to update approval task by Manager. The response has not been recorded."

I tested with my account (admin) on Friday, it failed. Tested with same account today, it worked.

Today for example, 1 user submitted 4 workflows and same manager approved:

3 times it worked, once it failed.

Any ideas as to what would cause or correct this sort of inconsistency? See attachments for error.

 

Thanks,

 

4 replies

B
Userlevel 5
Badge +8

Hi @maherfed 

 

Thisis likely an issue with which server is being hit when approving the task.  The 'Failed to Run' error will come up if the workflow is attempting to process on a Server that does not have the necessary web.config entries available.  This will typically occur if you have the Workflow Timer Job running on an application server. 

 

There are a few fixes for this, but the least impactful will be running the PowerShell script to add the web.config entries to the farm described in the posts below:

 

https://community.nintex.com/t5/Community-Blogs/The-infamous-quot-failed-to-run-quot-errors-in-the-history-list/ba-p/81393

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2674684/sharepoint-2010-workflow-fails-to-run-after-pause  (use method 1)

M
Badge +2

Hi @burked 

 

Great, thanks for the suggestions. I will test this out and let you know what happens.

 

Thanks again.

M
Badge +2
This seemed to do the trick - I will continue to monitor but in testing and monitoring requests we are now seeing great consistency and no failures since the back end of last week, where we were seeing random failures.
Thanks again, I marked this as a solution. Much Appreciated!
C
Badge

Hi,

 

We are having similar issue and it happens only for few documents. For the documents which this issue is happening, it happens on request approval step and when the workflow comes to this step, it shows approval status as not required. Usually for the documents which it works for, it shows Approval status as Pending. I have tried initiating workflow from within the servers where we have host files pointing to servers itself instead of load balancer. Workflow fails in both the WFE’s. I tried following the links provided in resolution above but they don’t show the required info, second one is not working and first link takes to nintex community page. I have compared SharePoint services running on both the app servers and also compared web.config files on both servers. They are identical. Is there anything else I need to look after or if we are missing anything else that could help us fix this issue?

 

Error message we are getting is:

The ”workflow name” workflow has ended unexpectedly for “file name”

For more information, please read this article: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=323543&clcid=0x409

 

 

Thank you!

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