If you are playing with Approval workflows, and you find that your workflows are erroring out even when you think it should have completed successfully, make sure you aren’t in a situation where you’re updating the approval status without having the approval functionality of your document or workflow library enabled.

It’s all built-in, but it doesn’t all automatically enable itself on need.

I ultimately found my answer on SharePoint Blogs, but my discovery route was circuitous.

First, the Unknown Error statuses on my workflow status page for the workflow. These workflows would error out and require termination from the workflow status page so they’d stop contributing to my active workflow counts. Searching around, I found out (look at Eilene Hao’s response to Misha) that you can get more info about these by going to where your Diagnostic Logs are kept. Find out where those logs are kept by going to SharePoint Central Administration, Operations page/tab, then under the Logging and Reporting section, click the link to Diagnostic Logging. On the next page, you’ll find out where those logs are under Trace Log.

Go to that directory in your front end web server(s) and use a decent directory search/grep (I used Textpad I have installed in portable mode on a USB key) to find log files with the word “workflow”. Upon doing that, I found the string/error, “System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: name”. Googling eventually led me back to the SharePoint Blogs post above.

So the fix is that if you’re going to use an ootb (out of the box) builtin workflow that updates the approval status of an item, you should also enable the “Require content approval for submitted items?” option in Versioning Settings for the list settings. This will do a lot of things automatically for you:

• When a list item is changed, the approval status for the item gets automatically changed back to “Pending”.
• When a person with the permission level to approve items looks at the list, they get a special view option called “Approve/reject Items”. (So they can bypass the approval workflow)
• The workflow that updates approval status stops erroring out.

It’s all pretty cool, but you have to know how it all hooks together.