Workflow outcome showing Pending even when approved


Badge +2

My organization has SharePoint 2013 on-premise and utilizing Nintex Workflow 2013. My user is having issue with the workflow outcome still showing Pending even when the task is approved. When viewing the workflow history, i can see that the Status is In Progress and Outcome is Pending but when i click on the Title (Third Level Approval) and view the approval task, it shows that it has been approved (screenshots below). So now the workflow is not proceeding forward and is stuck on this step.

Only possible cause I can think of for this behavior is if user clicked on the Save button multiple times during approving, but I am not sure. Any thoughts on the issue?


14 replies

Userlevel 6
Badge +16

Have you another actions like this?

Are they working ok?

Try deleting the action and creating it from scratch.

Badge +2

This is happening for only some items, not for all items and it's happening randomly only.

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

does the status updates after some longer time?

but I rather wonder why task assignee is empty. have you moderated it or is it really empty?

may it be that task wasn't responded at all and you just see selected some default value?

Badge +2

Assignee is not empty. I just deleted it for this post. And it was responded that's why clicking on that Third Level Approval link showed Approved selected in the task. And the status did not change. The task was approved on Monday 08/21 but the status nor outcome has changed. It seems like the workflow just stopped.

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

ok.

and what's overall workflow status? still in progress?

any interruption on sharepoint infrastructure (like timer job got stuck and was killed and restarted...)?

Badge +2

Hi Marian Hatala,  Workflow status is still Pending. There was no interruption in the timer job or restarted, not that I am aware of. If that was the case, shouldn't that impact all workflows running at that time? It seemed to happen for only one. I think restarting the workflow would resolve the issue which i suggested to the user, but i wanted to know the cause for it. Thanks

Userlevel 5
Badge +14

sorry, I'm running out of ideas.

however, such things sometime happens....

you may try to investigate ULS logs if you spot anything, or you may try to submit a ticket with ‌ whether they are able to suggest something.

Badge +5

@emha 

Hi Marian, we are having almost the same problem as this, only our task status is showing as Completed instead of In Progress. It's very sporadic - it happens on workflows that almost always successfully complete, but just once or twice a week the workflow doesn't continue after the task is completed. Since this post is from 2017 I'm wondering if there is now a solution? Thank you!

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Userlevel 5
Badge +14

@cherylshah, I'd suggest to start new thread....

 

to try to figure out might be going on in your scenario we would as well need more details on your setup, eg. env/version details, what task action you used, how the task was responded (desktop, mobile, LZA, webservice...), is task for single/multiple assignee, user or group, individual tasks or not, delegation, escalation etc. - anything what might have any impact on the task action behaves.

Badge +5

@emha I created a new post with all of the above requested information - would you be able to take a look at it please? https://community.nintex.com/t5/Nintex-for-SharePoint/Workflow-Task-is-Completed-but-Workflow-Outcome-Remains-Pending/m-p/90972#M66073

Badge +4

We've been having this same issue for over a year now, back and forth with the Nintex support team and even they are unsure of the root cause of the issue. Our issue ONLY lies within the lazy approvals though. We cannot process any lazy approvals for a single workflow (our site has 4 primary list workflows made almost identical) and if the user goes to the form for the task it processes perfectly fine. Its only when they try to use lazy approvals to respond to the task that it gets stuck in this "In Progress" mode. 

 

The support guys think it has something to do with permissions, so we shotguned the site and gave everyone full control and it didn't change anything. 

 

When a workflow gets to the "in progress" mode, it NEVER comes back out. We only have one approver as well and their approval comments get processed so we know sharepoint is getting it, but then not completing the task. I was even able to setup a workflow that monitors the workflow task page for any in progress workflows and was able to setup a notification to tell me when one shows up so we can make sure we know when it happens. not that it has helped at all...

 

Now the real head scratcher here is this: When we first see it, the issue only happens for 24 hours and then everything goes back to normal the next day. In one case we had it go on for 2 days in a row but all the other 50 or so occurrances of this it only goes on for one day. So we know if we hold workflows so they don't go into the approval phase if we wait 24 hours before sending them on they'll work just fine the next day with no changes what so ever to anything on the site. Of course the ones that have already gotten to "in progress" are not able to be kicked over. They have to be stopped and entirely restarted which means the manager has to approve it again. The biggest problem for us is the person who uses the lazy approval process is the last one to approve so we have to go back through the other 3 or 4 approvers before them and it causes a huge headache so we end up just doing a manual approval process for those on paper, which of course is less of a pain for the managers, but more work on the team using the workflow to process these approvals.

 

All signs point to some kind of permission issue but I don't know what would cause it. its like when the approver goes to make an approval they no longer have access to the workflow task list to update the task so it blows up. But even with full control on the list during the occurance of the issue they still can't update the task list on any tasks using lazy approval and if no permission changes are made and they use the nintex form for the workflow approval task, it works fine even when other lazy approvals are failing for the same user on the same workflow. 

 

Complete head scratcher... 

Badge +5

@waltont I feel a bit silly suggesting this since you've been working on it for so long and surely know, but, they aren't modifying the subject line in any way when they reply to the LazyApproval email are they?

Badge +4

I'd have to say the possibility exists, but its highly unlikely due to the nature of the issue. It happens for more tha one user, from completely different departments for a 24 hour period only. If they did it one day, they'd do it the next, or if ONE person was changing it another probably wouldn't. For instance the other day when we had the issue, we had 5 different users have the issue across the entire day. Its been working fine since and we have at least 5 to 10 per day.

 

Its a viable question though, but the simple answer is I doubt it.

Badge +5

Is there any sort of sync, crawl, or any other thing like that scheduled to run automatically that might be interfering while it runs?

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