Intermittent Designer Workflow Failures – Unable to execute query: Error 0x81020014

The past 3 weeks I have monitored another intermittent issue that is comically difficult to troubleshoot, this time related to the workflow infrastructure. End users report that list items fail to either create or copy between lists as expected (and defined in the business process workflows). I eventually opened a Microsoft Premier support case to sort this one out.

Issue

SharePoint Designer workflows (that have been in place for 6+ months and working normally) intermittently fail with the generic error message “The workflow could not create the list item…” or “The workflow could not update the list item…” while performing simple operations such as creating and copying list items. The ULS error code is 0x81020014.

Symptoms

End users report that list items fail to either create or copy between lists as expected (and defined in the business process workflows). The failures are intermittent and impact only some workflow instances. In a recent 5-hour window, I noted widespread workflow failures in the site collection, after which time behavior returned to normal.

Workflows that handle creating new list items and the copy of list items between similar lists will fail (abort) mid-process and not resume.

Error Messages

“The workflow could not create the list item. Make sure the list exists and the user has permissions to add items to the list.”

“The workflow could not update the item, possibly because one or more columns for the item require a different type of information.”

“Failed to cache field with id “{…}”, overwrite=0″

In the web front-end logs from the enterprise farm, we could see a number of failing workflow batches, a few list permission issues (producing the failing query messages), and registry access failures (producing access denied messages).

Solutions

Since the issue seems to correct itself with time and only affects a single site collection, the root cause seems to be with the “object cache” for the publishing infrastructure feature. (We have publishing infrastructure enabled at the site collection level and then at the site level.)

1. Make sure that the object cache service accounts are properly configured for the web application. TechNet article:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff758656%28v=office.14%29.aspx
   1. Make sure that the superuser and superreader accounts are permissioned correctly in the web application policy and are correctly configured in the web application properties via PowerShell.
2. When the intermittent failures occur again, try resetting the site collection’s object cache.  TechNet article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa622758(v=office.14).aspx

Further Reading

http://coreboarder.blogspot.com/2014/02/failed-to-cache-field-with-id-overwrite0.html

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/72cfe4c1-ff23-455a-b562-8cfcc2ee45db/sp-log-failed-to-cache-field-with-id?forum=sharepointgeneralprevious

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/sharepoint/en-US/3ca41a45-689c-4c85-b40d-76cc9b6ac00f/failed-to-cache-field-with-id-overwrite0?forum=sharepointgenerallegacy

Comments

1. 

   innomin
   April 14, 2015

   Leave a Reply

   Thank you very much! I hope this works
   • 

     Kyle
     April 22, 2015

     Leave a Reply

     Quite welcome.. I hope it works for you, too!