cancel all running workflows from another workflow in SharePoint designer 2010

Question

Currently, I have a workflow [WF1] that would check if the item has been submitted or saved. If it has been submitted, then the workflow would start another workflow [WF2] for the approval process. Everything works smoothly for this.

However, if a user edits an item and resubmits it while WF1 or WF2 is currently in progress, WF1 or WF2 would encounter an error since you cannot start a workflow that's already running.

So what I would want is when a user does this, the running workflows would be stopped or canceled then I would start WF1 again. Is there any way that I could do this through another workflow?

Answer 1

I don't think you can have one workflow clean up unfinished tasks either as a SharePoint Designer workflow cannot work in a state machine.

You could put a ton of logic into it, effectively a try-catch for each step, but you might go insane doing that

Please check the answer at below article.

Can you use a workflow to terminate another workflow

Answer 2

As other's have mentioned, this couldn't be done from another workflow. However you could stop that active workflow using splistitem itemupdated event receiver.

        SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate ()
        {
            using (SPSite site = new SPSite(properties.SiteId))
            {
                using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(properties.RelativeWebUrl))
                {
                    SPWorkflowManager manager = site.WorkflowManager;
                    SPListItem item = web.Lists[properties.ListTitle].GetItemById(properties.ListItemId);
                    foreach (SPWorkflow workflow in manager.GetItemActiveWorkflows(item))
                    {
                        foreach (SPWorkflowTask t in workflow.Tasks)
                        {
                            t["Status"] = "Canceled"; t.Update();
                        }
                        SPWorkflowManager.CancelWorkflow(workflow);
                    }
                }
            }
        });

ref: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/ef2be95b-f04f-429c-8895-8f1db308ef63/how-to-terminate-sharepoint-list-workflow-programmatically-in-an-event-receiver?forum=sharepointdevelopmentprevious