SharePoint 2010 State Machine delay activity (and why it may not fire)

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 21:44:35 +0000

A common problem in designing workflows is how to make the workflow “sleep” for a period whilst users do (or don’t do) something. A common scenario is where you wait for some user input, but if you don’t get any by a certain time to continue the workflow in a different stream. You achieve this with a delay activity where you specify a timeout in the form of a Timespan.

The delay activity was broken in SP2007 which was then fixed with a Hotfix. Surprisingly, this remains kind of broken in SP2010 as well. That is to say, the delay activity never wakes up.

State Machine on Matt Thornton

SharePoint 2010 State Machine delay activity (and why it may not fire)