Have you ever faced that issue? When your workflow is running smoothly and out of nowhere it gets suspended? Then when you hover the “i” icon to get more details you are informed, that “The workflow instance was too large to persist”? Well I had. Here is what I found and how I recommend to solve it.
My last project required creation of a dynamic list of approvers for the approval process (a coincidence? ), based on a location and volume threshold. And some other parameters, but this is not a case. At first I naturally thought about a list, that would hold such mappings for me. Then I thought to query that list within a workflow, using filtering to gather only a specific subset and then, using a state machine, to go through and assign tasks.
But there was a catch! Customer expected, that the form should allow to display that list of dynamically gathered approvers and then to show how each one expressed approval. And with the possibility to add or remove existing ones!
Although story of SharePoint Designer 2013 is slowly reaching its end and it is known for sure that shortly after 2020 will be deprecated, still there are many clients using it and developing their solutions with its help.