The BlancoWorld Workflow Reporting Feature

It's been a while since my last blog post because I've been extremely busy in SharePoint land with my job and finding spare time to write blog posts or work on useful add-ons has been very hard indeed.

However, over the last few weeks in the spare few minutes I manage to grab here and there I've been working on another add-on that hopefully some people will find useful. A fair few clients I work with have asked the question "how can I report on the workflows that are running or have completed in my site collection ?". The simple answer, as far as I'm aware, is that out of the box, you can't. This has led me to develop my lastest add-on – the BlancoWorld Workflow Reporting Feature. This feature is packaged, as you would expect, as a SharePoint solution file (.wsp) which you can download from here.

Once you had deployed the solution you need to activate a site collection feature appropriately called "BlancoWorld Workflow Reporting". Once this feature has been activated then anyone with the "Manage Lists" right will see a new item in their Site Actions menu called "Workflow Reporting" as seen below:

Selecting this menu option will display the following page:

Using this page you can determine at what level you wish to run the report. There are three options:

• This Site Only – selecting this option reports on workflows running only in the current site.


• This Site and Child Sites – selecting this option reports on any workflows running in the current site and any workflows running in any site beneath the current site. This is a recursive option that will interrogate every site in the site collection that resides beneath the current site.
  
• Entire Site Collection – as the name implies, selecting this option will report on any workflow within the whole site collection.

Once you have selected your desired option click on the "OK" button to proceed and the workflow report will be generated and displayed. In the example shown below I've chosen to report on workflows throughout the entire site collection:

The report that is generated contains the following columns:

• Site – a hyperlink to the site where the workflow is located.
  
• List – a hyperlink to the list or library where the workflow is located.
  
• Workflow Association Name – the name of the workflow association.
  
• List Item – a hyperlink to the list item on which the workflow is currently running or ran in the past.
  
• Workflow State – the current state of the workflow.
  
• Workflow Status – a hyperlink to the workflow status page for the workflow.

When you have finished interrogating your report click on the "Done" button.

Hopefully people will find this add-on useful. I've only tested this add-on in pretty basic scenarios and not in scenarios where there are hundreds / thousands of workflow instances in the site collection so I'd be interested to hear from peoples experiences in these scenarios. I imagine in these sort of scenarios the report may take a while to generate, so I'll consider wrapping the functionality in an SPLongOperation if this turns out to be the case.

If you have any issues with the add-on please drop me an email and I'll try and help as much as a I can. Also, if you'd like to see any other functionality included in the add-on then again please let me know and I'll see what I can do !!