SharePoint Dragons

What to do when you want to determine the current user in a workflow? It’s possible that the workflow runs inside the w3wp.exe worker process, in which case the current user makes sense. But it’s also possible that a workflow runs inside the owstimer.exe process, at a later time. In these cases, the current user doesn’t make sense. Instead, use the workflow originator or initiator.

To get the e-mail adress of the originator user:

workflowProperties.OriginatorUser.Email

Or

workflowProperties.OriginatorEmail

To get the display name of the originator user:

workflowProperties.Originator

Or

workflowProperties.OriginatorUser.Name

To get the login name (format [domain name]\[user name]:

workflowProperties.OriginatorUser.LoginName

These techniques can be used in workflows that are created programmatically. In a SPD (no-code) workflow, you can also retrieve the workflow initiator’s e-mail address: use the User Profile web service as a data form web part in the .aspx page of the workflow to get the e-mail address whenever the initiator started the workflow.

For ongoing work regarding workflow current user retrieval best practices, see: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/8044.sps-2010-best-practices-retrieving-the-current-user-in-a-workflow.aspx Thanks to http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointworkflow/thread/a5c5094c-5578-4e3c-83f2-62308f9f946f/ for the info.

• If the historical data doesn’t take up much space, leave it in the original list.
• Turn on versioning if you want to track the history of individual list items.
• If the history involves different records, leave them in the list and sort the view on the date of the history with the most recent at the top.

Finally, the most common option: eventually archive the items to a different site collection in a different content database.

Follow the ongoing Wiki effort to discuss the best practices regarding this topic at: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/7999.sharepoint-2010-strategies-for-handling-historical-data-in-custom-lists.aspx