How can I get the status of a Workflow in C#

Question

I need to get the status of a Workflow programatically. Things i tried:

• item[workflowName] - gave me a "8" altough the workflow is completed (seems to always return 8, I don't know why) (was not helpful)
• SPFieldWorkflowStatus.GetFieldValueAsText(item[workflowName]) - returns an empty string
• SPWorfklow.InternalState - was "locked | running | notStarted" in WorkflowStarting and WorkflowStarted Event. Was "completed" in WorkflowCompleted Event. Why was it in notStarted while in the WorkflowStarted Event?

Are there other ways to get the status of a workflow?

What i need to do for a customer is to create a column in a list where the customer is able to see the status of a workflow which runs on an other list (like a lookup, which i already tried to use but couldn't select the workflow field where the status is). That's why I'm now trying to solve it with a hyperlink field but I'm not able to get the correct status from a workflow.

Answer 1

Status workflow you can get using the following method

public string GetWorkflowStatus(SPListItem item, String workFlowName)
{
    SPWorkflowManager manager = item.Web.Site.WorkflowManager;
    foreach (SPWorkflow instance in manager.GetItemWorkflows(item))
    {
        if (instance.ParentAssociation.Name == workFlowName)
        {
            foreach (SPField field in instance.ParentList.Fields)
            {
                if (field is SPFieldWorkflowStatus)
                {
                    SPFieldWorkflowStatus statusField = (SPFieldWorkflowStatus)field;
                    if (statusField.Title == workFlowName)
                    {
                       int statusValue = int.Parse(item[statusField.StaticName].ToString());
                       return statusField.GetFieldValueAsHtml(statusValue);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return String.Empty;
}

Answer 2

The simplified version:

public static string GetWorkflowStatus(SPListItem listItem,  string workflowTitle)
{    
    var workflowStatusField = listItem.Fields[workflowTitle] as SPFieldWorkflowStatus;
    int statusValue = int.Parse(listItem[workflowStatusField.StaticName].ToString());
    return workflowStatusField.GetFieldValueAsHtml(statusValue);
}

Answer 3

It seems to be a problem with the amount of workflows running on that list. I read here that the status can return "8" if 15 or more workflows status fields exist in a list. We have currently 26 workflows running on that list and therefore I assume that's not possible to get the status without causing a ViewQueryOverflow.