I have been trying out SharePoint workflows using SharePoint designer and came across a pretty huge flaw in what you can do using designer, it doesn’t let you capture the current user!
I can't believe Microsoft haven’t made this an option, it's almost like it has been deliberately been omitted like quite a lot of things in SharePoint actually.
After a lot of internet crawling i found a guide on how to do it and even that wasn’t very detailed so i thought I would publish a step by step after filling in the gaps myself.
The original blog can be found here.
So within SharePoint Designer...
Click the action drop down
Select create list item
Click "this list" and select a custom list you have created (default settings are fine), I called by "Workflow User Workaround" and will use it for all workflows requiring the current user for this site.
Click add and select the title field, and enter any value you want as its the id that matters.
Click ok then click the variable link, give it a more meaningful name such as "ApprovedByCollect" and select "List item ID" as the Type then click ok
Add a pause item for 1 minute (this is the minimum), this is required as the list item isn’t always updated quickly enough.
Finally to access your variable, select a "Set Field in Current Item" action, select the field you want to apply the variable to (as in your approved by field) and then click the "value" link.
Select "Workflow Lookup" and click "Add >>>"
On the windows that pops up under Lookup Details, select the custom list you created as the source, "Created By" as the field.
Under Find the list item, select "customlistname:ID" as the field, next click the fx button next to value.
On the Define workflow lookup window that pops up select your "Workflow Data" as the source and your variable as the field and click ok.
Click ok on the previous window
Having previous set up virtual machines running Windows Server 2008 hosted from a Hyper V server i was quite optimistic about converting a physical to virtual conversion on an Server 2000 machine. The conversion worked fine.... once i abandoned Microsoft's tools and i got the VM up and running in no time.
The first thing i noticed was that the server wasn't very quick and was idling at 50% cpu usage on the vm task manager. You would think if this vm was struggling so much the vm host would be at least stretching it's legs but it wasnt barely above 0%.
I thought after hyper v tried and failed to convert a Server 2000 machine it was maybe down to some kind of OS emulation and the cpu was working twice as hard so i played about with the CPU allocation on the virtual machine setup but this made no difference at all.
After a bit of internet trawling I finally found the fix....
on the virtual machine go to device manager expand system and right click ACPI Multiprocessor device and choose properties
click the driver tab and click update driver select display a list of the known..... and click next click show all hardware of this device class.
Select the ACPI Uniprocessor device and click next click yes on the warning and then next then finish
finally restart the vm and things should be a bit more in line with Server 2003 / 2008 VMs.
I now officially have a blog, i know it's not much to look at just yet but there has been so many times when i had something to add but no site to add it to. At least this way i can post stuff while it's in my head and i can pretty up the site around the data when i have the time / inspiration. out!