Different Stages of SharePoint Workflow Life Cycle

Sharepoint workflow cycle is very much unique to Sharepoint environment. As we said Sharepoint workflows are always connected in context with a Sharepoint content like list or a document.

Figure: Four different stages in Sharepoint workflow

There are four stages in the Sharepoint workflow cycle -- associate, initiate, modify and complete.

Associate

As mentioned, workflows in Sharepoint are always talked about in context with a content type. So the first step is to associate a workflow with a content type like list or a document.

Initiate

The second step is to initiate the workflow instance. Workflows are nothing but classes finally so a workflow instance needs to be created to start the workflow in action.

Modify

Later the workflow instance is modified as per the workflow stages.

Complete

Finally the workflow object is terminated.

Figure: Screen and sharepoint workflow

The web forms of Sharepoint interact with WSS which in turn then interact with the windows workflow runtime. The windows workflow runtime passes details to the appropriate workflow instance depending on the data passed by WSS. The Sharepoint workflow instance then runs the workflow logic and takes appropriate action accordingl source: code project