Designer workflows can be great but I certainly ran into some major frustrations working with them with Designer 2007. One of those frustrations was not being able to associate a Workflow with a specific Tasks list. SharePoint will, be default, take the first Task list available and associate the workflow to that list. Fine you might say but if in time, you need to change that workflow/task association, you were pretty much in for trouble.
Fixing this is not straightforward as we can’t control the workflow affinity with its task list. I tried changing the ListID in the workflow’s config file but it would not solve the issue. Task items in the workflow would also contain references to the task list and even when those were changed, the workflow would still not be working. The only way to fix this issue it seemed was to delete all tasks created in the workflows, delete all the task forms on the server and then re-create all those tasks again from scratch. Ouch.. a lot of work just to point a workflow to a different Tasks list.
With designer 2010, I was more than curious to see if there would be an easy configuration available that would fix that issue… and the answer is…. YES THERE IS! If you edit your workflow and go under ‘Settings’, you will right away notice an area that let your configure the ‘Task List’.
You can now associate your workflow to a different Task List or even create one on the fly from the workflow setting page.
