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Greetings,

 

I have a Nintex workflow running on O365 list that was working for months and all of a sudden, it stopped working today and errors out with access is denied. Worked with the site owners to confirm that permissions has not be altered and verified the permissions myself.

 

Background Information - The site is opened up to everyone with Read access, however, the list and Workflow Tasks list have broken inheritance where the security group that contains every users in the organization is added with Contribute access. 

 

Troubleshooting steps -

  1. Ensured that WORKFLOWS CAN USE APP PERMISSIONS site feature was enabled.
  2. Verified that users were indeed able to create/add new items to the list.
  3. Re-initiated the workflow by clicking the RETRY NOW link within the workflow status.

 

In order to get the workflow to work, I temporary elevated every users' access as contributor or added the security group to the Members SharePoint Group which I don't think would be necessary. I have worked with the on-prem version of Nintex Workflow and it has always worked with list that had unique permissions.

 

Has anyone recently encountered a similar issue? Any suggestions or feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks.

Hi Tam,

Can you check if the users have write permission to the workflow history list? It's possible the workflow is trying to log information there.

Callum

Hi Callum,

Thank you for your suggestion. I have already tried this as well. Located the Nintex Workflow History broke the inheritance and elevate permissions to no avail. 

Regards,

Tam

If you can share the full error that appears on the workflow history page, (click the small blue i ), If it is hitting access denied against a list or other resource in your site it should be shown in the request. 

Thanks,

Here you go...

Workflow Status

Suspend this workflow
Activity in progress

Retrying last request. Next attempt scheduled after 11/29/2017 5:40 PM. Details of last request: HTTP Forbidden to https://<domain>/sites/SM/_api/web/lists(guid'1c3795dc-844a-453b-9959-e9253086c550')/Items Correlation Id: e68ccead-98de-864c-b665-6952de015fe7 Instance Id: 449689d9-9d5e-4b74-bc08-421bc5c88901

Access denied. You do not have permission to perform this action or access this resource.
Retry now

Hi Callum,

Your suggestion worked. Thank you. I initially went to the Nintex Workflow History list to elevate permissions which didn't work, then I tried the SharePoint Workflow History and that fixed it. 

SharePoint Workflow History - http:///servername]//sitename]/lists/Workflow%20History

Nintex Workflow History - http:///servername]//sitename]/lists/NintexWorkflowHistory

I am not sure if I should be altering permissions to workflow history list. Do you know if there is going to be a permanent fix for this so I don't have to break permissions inheritance?

Thanks,

Tam

Hi Tam,

The requirement of the workflow is that user's can write to the history list - the reason being that a normal workflow that starts will run with the privileges of the user who initiates the workflow. Log to History and other writing to the history log operates as a create list item, so without that permission it is not possible. This would also be true for SharePoint Designer 2013 workflows.

Thanks,

Callum

I have exactly the same problem that has just started. Failures started on 29/11 Australian time. Still trying to work through and understand the issue.

Hi Barry,

If you have changed the permissions on the history list, if you resume a workflow that suspended, does it now log a message to history? If so, is it an expected message?

Where about in the workflow does this occur also, a random point, or the beginning?

Thanks,

Callum

Hi Callum,

It occurs at the very beginning of a workflow. I added a log to history action and republished and that was not happening.

So yes, I have updated the permissions on the 2 lists mentioned above. And it does look I can resume those workflows.

However, while everything you've said about permission on the history lists makes sense, something has definitely changed in the past 2 days. My workflow has been in action for about 8 months up until now, and I can be sure there have been no permission changes at play.

Cheers,

Barry

Hi there,

We are having the same issue. I cannot see the Nintex workflow history list on the site.

Nintex Workflow History - http://[servername]/[sitename]/lists/NintexWorkflowHistory

And the sharepoint workflow history list is there and the users do have access to contribute to the list. It is inheriting the permissions from the parent site, where all the users are able to contribute. 

SharePoint Workflow History - http:///servername]//sitename]/lists/Workflow%20History

I'm even a site admin and I terminated one of the workflows and tried to restart it, i still get an access denied for me (admin). 

Any explanation to this behaviour?!

Hi Christine,

Sorry for the late response. The Nintex Workflow History URL should be as follows:

 /external-link.jspa?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhttps://<domain>/<managed path>/<site>/lists/NintexWorkflowHistory

Thanks,

Tam

Not sure why the URL got changed.

http://<domain>/<managed path>/<site>/lists/NintexWorkflowHistory

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