Monthly Archives: June 2014

I had an odd situation reported to me a week or so ago, and I finally figured out what was going on.

In this case, we have a list that supports attachments. The customer reported that they added six attachments to the list item (combination of .xlsx, .docx, and .pdf files). All of the files showed up in the attachment list, but once they saved the list item and opened it back up, the .pdf attachment was gone.

Of course, like all good IT issues, I tried the same thing and it kept the .pdf file I tried to attach… 🙂

When I spent some more time looking at her example, it occurred to me that the .pdf file name was rather long… like 131 characters worth. Given that the file name length maximum in SharePoint is 128 characters, that would be a problem.

So apparently what happens is that you can “attach” the file with the name that’s too long to the list item, but when you go to save it, it gets dropped. Unfortunately, you don’t get any indication that it did so… it’s just… gone.

Today I was working on an approval workflow for a site I’m building, and I decided to use the SharePoint Designer version of the Approval workflow rather than the out-of-the-box version. Everything went fairly well until I noticed that rejecting an approval task did not cancel the approval workflow.

In the out-of-the-box version, you can set those options here:

Unfortunately, those same options are not exposed as openly in the SPD version. Instead, you have to set the CancelonChange and CancelonRejection workflow variables to Yes before you start the approval cycle:

Once I did that, anyone who rejected an approval task would cause the entire approval workflow process to halt (as I wanted).

Thanks to Slinger’s post for helping me figure this out: http://slingeronline.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/setting-cancel-on-first-rejection-on-an-spd-workflow/