CRM4.0 Workflow Deployment – Invalid reference

Workflow is a nice way to plan a schedule on the server and trigger any specific actions when it meets some specific circumstances. Custom workflow activity and out-of-box workflow customizations are two ways to come up.  Out-of-box workflow customization is really straightforward but a bit tricky when you deploy it to a production server, as some default values or static entry are referenced in a workflow within the old organization, but it couldn’t be indentified in the new organization.  Such an error message is popped up in my case:

“This workflow contains errors and cannot be published” – it’s misty as no specific description was given and you couldn’t find any other information neither Event Log nor CRM logs. It works well in development environment, what happened to this? 

Let’s have a careful look at the workflow itself, detail error information was found when you put the mouse on one of the cross: “this workflow includes an invalid reference. For more information, contact your Microsoft Dynamics CRM administrator”. And the innermost level cross indicates the place the error occurred. In my case here is “Send Mail” activity below.

Click “Set Properties” button to open the email template to see the details. “Allan” was referenced here as a default value (static value), this entry doesn’t exist in the new system yet, or even if exists, CRM server couldn’t identify it as the ID of this contact/user is changes.  

The easiest way to change it is replace “From” field to an existing contact/user – just fix the non reference error. Like below, I changed “Allan” to “CRM Administrator” which is a user of this CRM server.

The same way, if any other default values/static values are referenced in this workflow, you have to fix them all.

 It’s time to publish your workflow once all the cross fades away.