List Item Not Found

For this particular scenario, here was my setup:

1. I have two lists: Survey and Customers
2. Survey has a custom column called Customer that is of type Lookup. This column is configured to lookup on the Title column in Customers
3. My custom SD workflow has a single activity, the Update List Item activity, configured to update the Customers list, on the Survey Status column, and the criteria for determining what item to update is based on the Customer lookup in the Survey list

Pretty straight forward stuff. I’ve done this a thousand times before and it’s worked without issue. However, I ran into a specific list where the workflow would error every single time, with the List Item Not Found message. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to get any information other than what’s in the workflow history log. I attempted to read through the operations logs as well, but the information wasn’t really too helpful.

Doing some basic troubleshooting by adding an email activity and outputting the lookup variables in the body helped me determine that the Customer column in the Survey list was returning a blank value. That’s strange. Adding, editing and displaying items in the Customer list gives me no issue, I can select customers from my lookup and they read just fine. So why the heck does my workflow not properly record this value?

It gets a bit more puzzling when I grant myself Site Collection Administrator access to my site. Now all of a sudden, the workflow works and the lookup executes without issue. My entry in the Customers list is updated, all is happy for once. But granting users Site Collection Administration access is not a viable solution. It’s actually pretty crazy, so that’s not going to happen.

So after much frustration, I am sorry to report I don’t have much new information. What I did attempt to do however, was build my own version of the Update List Item activity in Visual Studio 2008. That turned out to be relatively straight forward. I used a bit of reflector to get the bits that I needed to successfully write this. That gave me the debugging capabilities that I desperately needed.

What I was now able to see with my custom activity was that the ListItem property was returning -1, and thus the GetItemById call on the Customers list was unable to find the item. Now why in the world was it returning -1? I’m still puzzled by this, and I’m not 100% sure if this is indeed a permissions related problem or if it’s something a entirely different.

I’m opening this up to anyone out there who might have some information regarding this particular issue. In the end, I wrote a custom Visual Studio sequential workflow, with literally 5 or so lines of code that essentially does the update for me and that runs without issue. I didn’t want to have to do that, but it was the only option I was left with for this particular list.

If anyone has any info, please drop me a line @ shereen at qumsieh dot ca. I would LOVE to get to the bottom of this.