Approval Workflow Termination

If the approval workflow is terminated or the workflow terminates unexpectedly for any reason, the following events will occur:

  • The document’s version will be incremented to the next minor version of the pre-approval version.
  • The document’s Lifecycle Status will be set back to “Draft”.
  • The document’s Workflow Status will be update to “Approval Workflow Terminated”.
  • New Audit Log entries will be created to record the termination events:
    • There will be a Workflow Terminated entry. This entry’s description will either identify the User-ID of the user who terminated the workflow or will indicate that the workflow terminated as a result of an error in the workflow.
    • There will be a Lifecycle Status Change entry which indicates that the document lifecycle status was updated from “In Approval” to “Draft” by SharePoint\system.
    • There will be a Version Change entry whose description will identify the before and after version numbers.


  • The overall workflow status on the Workflow Overview will be set to Canceled and the Completed On date will be set to the date and time of the termination.
  • The Workflow History for that instance of the Approval workflow will be updated to reflect the date and time of the termination.
  • All tasks that were “In Progress” when the workflow terminated will be cancelled and their status will be updated to reflect the cancellation.
  • The User Actions for the tasks that were cancelled will be updated to a status of Canceled.
  • All approvers whose tasks were cancelled will be notified via email that they no longer need to approve the document.
  • The workflow initiator will be notified via email that the workflow terminated.