Patrick Zaw – Blog

Sharepoint Workflow Starter is a tool I made for helping with mass starting/stopping workflows for items accross a Sharepoint site.

Download: The executable and source code are available at http://www.codeplex.com/SPWorkflowStarter.

***TEST IN YOUR DEV ENVIRONMENTS FIRST!***

The app needs to be run on a Sharepoint server with an account that has sufficient permissions to access the API.

This is what it looks like…

So lets say you want to run the Approval workflow for every item in every list for a site and all its subsites. Here’s how we could do that:

1) Looking at the example above, you would first navigate to the site you want, in this case the root site http://stdemo.

2) Under that site we can find all the workflow templates available and we’ll select the Approval workflow template.

3) Once we select the Approval workflow template, you can check Run for all sub sites so that this workflow will run for all lists for this site and any sub sites.

4) You must choose the actions to take, stop, start, and you can also choose to use your own custom event data.

*Custom event data is the xml data passed to the workflow. When selecting a workflow template you will not see the event data that will be used by default because the workflow association to its list is what defines the event data. If you want to see what the event data looks like, select a list under that workflow template and you’ll see the event data used for that workflow association.

5) You can choose to log your results. This should always be done because I have yet to add any verbose output except in the logs.

6) Review your plan below and then click EXECUTE when ready.

The same steps above can be done for a list or single items in a list.

The tool still needs some work and if would like to help please drop me a line. Some future release features would be:

• Running workflows for multiple items (via checkbox)
• Better UI form design
• Better log output control
• Easier way to edit event data
• A lot of code clean up :-O