Sunday, November 6, 2011

SharePoint Designer cannot display the item

Recently i developed a workflow in SharePoint Designer 2010 which includes a custom activity in it.

It worked well and suddenly after making some changes to the custom activity code, i got an error "SharePoint Designer cannot display the item" and from then i am unable to open the workflow.











Obviously, its because of code error in Custom Activity. But I cannot directly remove the reference to custom activity since I am unable to open the workflow in designer.

The workaround for this problem which i found is that simply edit the Workflows XOML file and remove the custom activity reference from it. Thats it !







































Remember, SPD caches the workflow files. Hence, restart your SharePoint designer and you can open the Workflow in Designer :)

5 comments:

  1. Another workaround that may help (if you have altered the .xoml file and don't want to delete the action you've adjusted)

    Change SharePoint Designer 2010 settings - open Application Options and untick 'Cache site data...'

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    Replies
    1. Corry..I tried that but in my case, the problem was with custom action. So had to delete the action. Thanks for your workaround :)

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    2. Can someone please advise how to find this "custom action?"

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  2. Same question : what are the "custom actions" ? I think I've only used the regular workflow actions...

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  3. Here's what worked for me: I found the xoml file, right-clicked on it, and from the version history went one version back (the current version and the first version back were the same date/time). It fixed it and I had my most current version of the workflow back.

    I'm not sure what caused it, but it works now.

    ReplyDelete