The Frog Pond of Technology

PowerShell Script To Find Instances Of Running SharePoint Workflow

    This is a quick blog post for a fun PowerShell script I got to write today.  My client asked me to make a listing of all instances of a particular workflow currently running on one of our SharePoint farms.  Since we have dozens of SharePoint lists spread out across numerous sub-sites on this farm I decided to tackle the request with PowerShell.

    Here is a quick overview of what the scrip accomplishes.  First I get a reference to the site collection in question.  Next I get the workflow template from the name of the workflow I’m checking for.  Next I search all webs within the site collection and all lists within each web.  I filter the lists for any workflow associations with a BaseId matching my workflow template Id while also having at least 1 running instance.  Once I know there are running instances on this list I can then loop through all items in the list checking for workflows that are in the “Running” state.  I then output the SPWeb name, SPList name, and SPListItem name into a delimited output.

    On a side note you may notice that I use $($variable.property) in my “write-output…” command.  I do this so that the property values are evaluated first before being passed to the the output stream.  If you attempt $variable.property you’ll most likely end up with a default value for $variable (typically ToString()) followed by “.property” which is not the intended result.

Download Script

Click here for a copy of this script off my SkyDrive.

*Note: As I’m currently very busy with SharePoint Saturday Columbus tasks this script is just in draft form so no recursive traversal of site hierarchy, input parameters, comments, etc.

$workflowNameToCheck = "My Sample Workflow"

$url = "http://SharePointDemo"

$spSite = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($url)

$spWeb = $spSite.OpenWeb()

$workflowBase = $spweb.WorkflowTemplates | where {$_.Name -eq $workflowNameToCheck}

$spWeb.Dispose()

foreach($spWeb in $spSite.AllWebs)

{

    for($i = 0; $i -lt $spWeb.Lists.Count; $i++)

    {

        $spList = $spweb.Lists[$i]

        $assoc = $spList.WorkflowAssociations | where {$_.BaseId -eq $workflowBase.Id.ToString() `

                            -and $_.RunningInstances -gt 0}

    if($assoc -ne $null)

        {

        foreach($item in $spList.Items)

            {

                if(($item.Workflows | where {$_.InternalState -eq "Running"}) -ne $null)

                {

                    write-output "$($spWeb.Name) | $($spList.Title) | $($item.Name)"

                }

            }

        }

    }

    $spWeb.Dispose()

}

$spSite.Dispose()

Conclusion

    This script (very much in draft form) checks for running instances of a given workflow within a site collection.  After writing this script today I felt that this is probably a common search for some people so I hope you can glean some useful information from it.  If you find it useful or have any questions feel free to let me know.  Enjoy!

      -Frog Out

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