I’ve been developing some workflows recently in SharePoint Online and ran into an interesting issue I thought I’d write about. Basically, I encountered an error (“Error updating a list item”) every time I tried to assign a group to a standard task. The funny thing was that assigning to groups worked fine when using the custom SharePoint Designer “to do” items, but in my case I really needed to create standard tasks. Here was the error:
I actually found the solution in this thread. Basically, you must supply the group ID (number) to the task item and, unfortunately, SPD doesn’t provide this. That’s life…at least for the current revisions of both the client and server-side software as of today.
But never fear, there is a fairly straightforward workaround for this….and its especially handy if you need to assign tasks to multiple groups and you don’t know the IDs up front. All you have to do is create a new custom list; I named mine “Workflow Roles”. The first column, “title”, represents the name of the workflow role. The second column represents the actual SharePoint group. For this column, the “Show field” option is set to “ID”.
You can then create a new role as a list item….
….with the resulting data being the group number.
A basic Workflow Lookup can then easily match up on role name and retrieve the numeric value for the group.
Voila. Assignment to groups works. I’m a little surprised there aren’t more postings about this issue.
