Recently one of my client’s main app servers in production went belly up. We believe there was some corruption in the VM image. No matter the reason it was not a pretty situation to be in. We had to rebuild the machine. As part of this it was decided to re-install the workflow engine and the previous database associated with the engine was not used. First Problem. So the workflow engine was installed and started from scratch. And from testing everything seemed to be working fine, granted testing involved creating a new workflow in SharePoint Designer to make sure it recognized that the scope and engine was configured.
Here is where we ran into a problem. We had a custom workflow definition that we were deploying to the different site collections that were created for different groups. After the recovery was done we started receiving reports from users that the workflows would throw errors and not start. I did some digging in the ULS and found that the workflow engine would throw one of two errors. It would either throw a scope not found exception or a workflow not found exception both with a root error of a 404 coming from the workflow engine (more on this later). So I deactivated the feature that added the workflow and then let the web part that started the workflow handle the activation and setup. The workflow would still fail. Continue reading “Recovering from Lost Workflow Server in SharePoint 2013”