Workflow Error: “An error has occured in Approval”
Recently, I had a user ask me about the an error they saw in the Workflow Information for a document. The library was using an out-of-the-box approval workflow and, after all the approvers had approved the document, the Workflow Information listed an Error event by user System Account with a description of “An error has occured in Approval”.
After some investigation, it turns out the error is caused by a configuration mismatch. There is a pair of settings, one in the document library, one in the workflow that must be matched otherwise this error will occur. In this particular case, the “require content approval” option in the document library was off while the “update the approval status” activity in the workflow was on.
Thankfully, the solution to this particular problem is fairly straightforward. Either turn on “require content approval” (using Document Library Settings > Versioning Settings) or turn off the “update the approval status” activity (using Document Library Settings > Workflow Settings > [select appropriate workflow] > Next button).
Changing the settings will prevent all future workflows from having this error; however, when the error occurs, the workflow stays running and changing the options after the fact, has no effect. I tried changing both options separately to see if the workflow would respond but it appears the only solution for running workflows is to terminate them (which changes the workflow status to cancelled).