Getting the error messages for custom workflow activity.

Normally if there are any errors in our custom workflow activity for a given workflow instance, its status reason would be set as “waiting” and we would see the following message

"An error has occurred. Try this action again. If the problem continues, check the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community for solutions or contact your organization’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM Administrator. Finally, you can contact Microsoft Support."

Obviously the above message doesn’t help us much.

So to find the exact reason for the error, we can do the following,

• Go to Advanced Find View
• Click on New
• Select “System Jobs” for look for drop down.
• Set condition as
• Status equals Suspended
• SystemJobType equals Workflow

And also click on “edit columns”, and using “add columns” add Message (Display Name) column.

And the results of the advanced find view.

Here we can also do this one more thing,

We can customize the system job (asyncoperation) entity’s form to include the message field in it.

However this cannot be done in supported manner. To enable system job entity for customization we need to run the following query against our Org_MSCRM database.

update entity
set iscustomizable=’1′
where name=’Asyncoperation’

And then customize the “System Job” entity’s form to include the Message attribute in it.

This is how it would look like !

Bye…