Getting An SPD Approval Workflow To Cancel On Rejection Or Change

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/