SharePoint Designer workflow is looping itself when waiting for a field to change

Question

I have a problem with a standard SharePoint Designer workflow on a forms library in SharePoint 2010 Foundation.

When the workflow is firing off it is designed to fill some information in against the document, send an email to the relevant person and then wait for a field (in this case called 'Capex Status') to change from the value it is currently set at. The workflow is working fine but it appears that then it is getting to the point where it is waiting for the field to change it is going back to the beginning and doing the same steps again until it gets to the wait on the field where it then actually waits as required.

This is a problem that has no logical pattern to it, by which I mean that sometimes this doesn't happen, other times it 'loops' back through the first few steps once more and sometimes it can 'loop' back through the first steps a fair number of times (I think 8 is the record I have found).

To summarise, the workflow completes the relevant steps until it reaches an action for 'Wait for field ot change' and then goes right back to the beginning of the workflow and re-runs all the steps up until the wait action again (sometimes once, sometimes several times before it finally behaves and actually waits for the field to change).

I have inserted an image of the workflow history log (below) to show what is happening and highlighted where it is sending an email twice (in this case) where it should only be sending it once...

Can anyone point me in the direction of how I can rectify what is going on here please?

Answer 1

I wish I could create a loop in a SharePoint designer workflow :-)

Try adding a Wait 1 minute step at the beginning of your workflow, it can address what seem to be race conditions by moving the workflow execution from the wfe to a timer job. By default the timer runs every 5 minutes, so be patient.

Answer 2

This problem may be because you are using the System Account. I would suggest you to go with another account.

This soultion doesn't seems to be logical, but i have faced various issues like this just because of this small cases.

Thanks