Workflow 'was cancelled by system account'

Question

I am trying to make a simple 2010 workflow in SP Designer, I am using SP 2013. The workflow is made at the List Level: [Email MyUserGroup]. Manual start is enabled. I can successfully trigger the manual start on this workflow and it sent an email on site collection A, but the same workflow configuration will not work on site collection B.

I am the SharePoint Administrator for the whole farm, including Site Collection A & B, although I am logged in as a user when I manually trigger the workflows.

I found a similar issue - the error code I have is the same. I have also read that the 'System Account' is to blame for these instances, though I am puzzled why the workflow functions on site collection A but not B.

To give some more details, when I look at the Workflow Status page I see the following:

• Initiator: [MyUserName]
• Status: Failed to start
• Event Type: Workflow cancelled
• User ID: System Account
• Description: Workflow [MyWorkflowName] was cancelled by System Account.

I will test tonight whether the Information Management Policy Setting is able to start the workflow and send the email message. It should be triggered 0 days after creation date (today).

Thanks for any feedback. David

Answer 1

It seems you haven't enabled workflow app permissions. Please try with below link and i hope this will resolve your issue.

https://dev.office.com/sharepoint/docs/general-development/create-a-workflow-with-elevated-permissions-by-using-the-sharepoint-workflo

Answer 2

I've investigated the other Answer by gachCoder, but my workflow is a 2010 one. But I had a similar kind of workflow error again.

I found the Answer by Hardik in this post solved my issue.

24/09/2018 Update to Answer: you might also like to read this Answer relating to whether or not it is safe to deactivate and reactivate a workflow Site Feature (it seems like running workflows would/could be lost).

Answer 3

If you look in the ULS logs for SharePoint and spot an error along the lines of below -

Type System.CodeDom.CodeBinaryOperatorExpression is not marked as authorized in the application configuration file.

Then you're likely missing some required Assembly Authorizations in web.config which is a known issue with the latest updates.

There's plenty of info online and I've also written a short article on fixing this - https://spandcrm.com/2018/10/11/sharepoint-2013-workflows-failing-with-failed-to-start-error/

Answer 4

For us, sharepoint 2013, the issue was due to last KB causing an issue. Fixed by modifying the web.config of each web servers using this script which will add the lines in the web config of each WFE. Make sure your backup your web.Config before running this :

Additional Information about the KB causing the issue