So ran into a very weird issue. I had just finished patching our Dev and Test servers to the November 2017 CU. And after this occurred, any updates to solutions using JavaScript injection was not working. I’ll describe the problem in more detail here right away, but I want to make sure I give a call out to Trevor Seward. Trevor blogs from The SharePoint Farm and kudos goes to him for pointing me at the Blob Cache (but I am getting ahead of myself).
I have been working with SharePoint for a long time. An error was encountered not long ago that I have never seen when patching a SharePoint server (and unfortunately I have seen a lot of errors over the years). While running the configuration manager I received the following error:
“An exception of type System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException was thrown. Additional exception information: Invalid object name ‘Webs’.”
The error of course was really nice and pointed me to the log file to get more information. Opening up the log file and searching for ERR (put space at the end to have a better chance of finding an error entry instead of other words containing those letters) I was expecting loads of information to be made available to me so I could easily fix this problem. I really should have known better as I received the following:
At no point in the logs did it tell me where this problem was occurring. So where do we go from here?
Well let’s dig into it shall we?
While planning out a new series I want to do around PowerApps and Flow I realized one of the things I needed to do was get the value of a lookup field into a text field. Now we all know that using a calculated field for this isn’t going to work since they can’t see lookup fields. Yes I could use a choice field instead, but in this case I wanted a lookup field so that the users could easily update the choices from the lookup list. There are a number of examples of doing this with a SharePoint Designer Workflow. So I got thinking, but about Flow? I found a number of examples of users asking for ways to do this or having problems doing it, but nothing really concrete. So I decided to write something up quick as it really is very easy to do with flow.
Over a year ago, I wrote about SharePoint’s storage limits and threshold, why they are there and and can they be exceeded. I had started to illustrate how the content databases could be exceeded and to what extent, but I really never got to do some more in depth tests. I had promised to come back one day and perform more tests and to show if pushing SharePoint content databases beyond 200GB is possible in your environment.
Back in October I did an overview of the different ways to wait for a change in a SharePoint Workflow. You also have the option to wait for a certain time, there are two options which are waiting for a set duration or waiting until a set date. Either of which are easy to control or set. I am not focusing on these actions in this post, but just a quick note if you want the date to be dynamic when using wait until a date, then you will have to set the date you want in a workflow variable prior to setting the wait value. Otherwise your date is going to have to be static and that’s probably not going to work for you in 99% of your workflows.
Today, however I want to discuss waiting for a value to change on the list your workflow is attached to.
Bit of a disclaimer: Why am I still talking about SharePoint Designer? Why not Microsoft Flow? Don’t worry, I have some Flow blogs planned. However, Designer is still widely used and will be for some time. I encourage others to use flow where they can, but remember that not everyone has access to that yet. Designer is free and anyone with a SharePoint environment can make use of it. Hence, I still see providing insight and knowledge on this product very important.
I have a bit of a TLDR here as you may be just looking for the answer, and not WHY it is occurring. I strongly urge you to read the whole post to understand why things are the way they are and to make you a better person ;-p, but if you are in a hurry or think I talk\write too much, just click here to find out what you need to do.