Approval Task Workfow 2013

Question

I have a 2010 Approval Task Workflow. When an item on my list is created, an approval task is created. With the standard approval workflow 2010, when the task is created, it is accessible inside the workflow itself.

I have to rewrite it into a 2013 workflow, where the OOB Approval Workflow seems not to be available, since 2010. The solution I found is this one. The problem is that in this case we have no access to the created task, we only get a TaskID/Guid (see .21 of link).

What exactly is this ID? Is there a way to access the created task inside this workflow once the task has been approved or denied?

Answer 1

What exactly is this ID?

The TaskID is the ID of the newly created (assigned) task in the same step. it's by design assigned to a variable called TaskID.

Is there a way to access the created task inside this workflow once the task has been approved or denied?

Depends on your permission, you can check the Workflow Tasks in the associated task list for your workflow.

Note: You need a contribute permission on a Workflow task list to can approve or reject the assigned tasks.

To open the associated task list, do the following:

• Open Workflow via SharePoint Designer.
• In its settings, below customization, Click open the task list.
• From the above ribbon, click on preview in browser option.

Answer 2

I found out that the returned TaskId indeed IS the identifier of the new created element, but not the ID, it is the GUID.

I did't know that each SharePonint element has also a unique Guid which allows to lookup an element as the ID does.