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Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Access site column in Subsites

We have created a site collection and under it many sites and subsites, now our aim was to create some basic lists like state , city,country etc at the top level site and refer the same across all the subsites. We faced the problem ,where in a lookup column you can only refer the lists of current site. In order to add one of the columns from a Parent site list in a subsite list we did the following .
1. Create a site column. - In parent Site Go to Settings -> Site Column. Here Create a new site column and choose the type as Lookup. Get the Lookup Information from Another list and Select your Parent list and its realted Column.
2. Add site Column in your Subsite's list - Now go to your subsite list and goto list settings. Under Columns add a existing site column and select the above created custom column.
Hope it helps

Workflow stuck at Starting

Workflow stuck with "Starting" status is probably the most difficult to debug because there are generally no diagnostic entries in the ULS logs or event logs to point you to a problem.
The problem we faced at our work place is that all setting are as per this blog post http://www.tonytestasworld.com/post/Sharepoint-2007-Workflow-stuck-in-quot3bStartingquot3b-state-and-never-completes-when-set-to-start-programmatically.aspx .
i.e
1 Environment is properly configured with the SSP and everything set up correctly as mentioned in the blog.
2. Windows Sharepoint Timer service is up and running.
3. Domain account was used for configuring SSP.
Even after doing all the stuff workflows were getting stuck with a "Starting" status.
We have a custom workflow attached to a Document library and it is supposed to trigger when a new item is added or changed. The library has the 'require check out before editing' setting enabled so even a manual document upload to the library would first check the document in and then you'll be presented with the screen for providing any required metadata and once you are through that THEN the workflow would trigger (workflow requires a document to be checked-in before it can start).
So disabling the 'require check out before editing' solved the issue for us.