Nowadays we are working quite a lot with SharePoint Designer 2013 based workflows. On workflows I mean the “new”, Workflow Manager based ones.
Recently we wanted to access a workflow task field beyond the standard outcome to use its value in another part of the workflow. For example, we need the value of the Description field, as the explanation of the decision made on the form (rejection vs. approval).
To achieve that, we stored the workflow task Id in a variable called TaskID (see above), and planned to use it as a lookup value from the task list (see below). Note, that we used the ID field in the lookup list, Data Source is Assocciation: Task List, that is the standard Worklow Tasks list in our case.
The value of the TaskID variable is returned as integer:
After publishing the workflow and creating an item to test it, the workflow task was created. We entered some text in the Description field, and approved the task. We found, that the workflow gets stuck in the Suspended status. Resuming it has not helped either.
The error description we had:
RequestorId: 3c361109-ce76-de39-0000-000000000000. Details: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the workflow instance. Exception details: System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format. at System.Number.StringToNumber(String str, NumberStyles options, NumberBuffer& number, NumberFormatInfo info, Boolean parseDecimal) at System.Number.ParseInt32(String s, NumberStyles style, NumberFormatInfo info) at Microsoft.Activities.Expressions.ParseNumber`1.Execute(CodeActivityContext context) at System.Activities.CodeActivity`1.InternalExecute(ActivityInstance instance, ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager) at System.Activities.Runtime.ActivityExecutor.ExecuteActivityWorkItem.ExecuteBody(ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager, Location resultLocation)
The resources we found on the web here, here and there did not help to much, but the error message itself did.
The reason of the error was, that the TaskID (a variable of type String) we have from the Assign a task action is actually the Guid of the task item, but we wanted to use it to look up the task based on its ID field (an Integer). Of curse, the workflow engine was not able to convert the Guid to an integer value.
The correct lookup is illustrated below. We use the GUID field for as the lookup field, and TaskID is returned as a string:
With this “minor” modification the workflow runs as expected.
After we solved the problem I found that the the original requirement (getting field value from a specific workflow task as data source via lookup) was already discussed and solved earlier, see this thread and this one.
