Pausing, resuming, and canceling workflows

Once a workflow has been started, it proceeds step by step toward completion, as long as individual participants fulfill their assignments, mark them as completed or not completed, approve or deny requests, etc. The workflow will not stop running until it completes successfully, encounters an error or exception that causes it to fail, or is manually paused or canceled.

If you are the owner, or have been granted the Manage permission by the owner (see "Setting workflow permissions") you can cancel, pause, and resume workflows. If you pause a workflow instance, you can resume it at any time. If you cancel the workflow instance, it cannot be resumed, and will need to be restarted as a new instance.

You can use Process Manager's Windows console to pause, resume, or cancel all currently-executing instances of a workflow. To pause, resume, or cancel individual instances of a workflow, you will use Process Manager's Web application.

To pause, resume, or cancel all currently-running instances of a workflow
  1. Right-click the workflow in the Workflow explorer.
  2. Click Manage | Pause all instances OR Resume all instances OR Cancel all instances.
  3. Click OK to confirm that you want to pause, cancel, or resume all instances of the workflow.
  4. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation message.
To pause, resume, or cancel an individual instance of a workflow
  1. Right-click the workflow in the Workflow explorer.
  2. Click Reports | Audit history
  3. Enter your user name and password to log on to the Web application.
  4. Click Run Report.
  5. On the Table view tab, find the specific instance of the workflow you want to pause, cancel, or resume.
  6. Click on the Request ID link for the workflow instance.
  7. In the panel in the top half of the screen, note that the Status column indicates that the instance is currently executing.
  8. Note the Cancel request, Pause request, and Resume request links near the middle of the screen. These links will only appear if you are the owner (or have been granted the Manage permission by the owner) of the workflow.
  9. Click the action you want to take,
  10. Click OK to confirm, then click OK to dismiss the confirmation message.
  11. Note that the Status column now reflects the action you took on the workflow instance.

Whenever a workflow is canceled, paused, or resumed, an entry is added to the workflow's audit history. A similar entry is also added to the LANDesk.Workflow.ServiceHost log file, located in the LANDesk\ProcessManager\Web Services folder.

When a workflow is paused