This error message tends to reveal itself whenever you’re dealing with item-level permissions. Try the following to resolve this error.
Note: For any change to a workflow, you’ll need to start/restart your workflow to test it. Resuming a workflow will only resume the previous version of the workflow (still broken).
- Workflow Credentials
- In SharePoint 2010 workflows, use impersonation steps to have workflows run as the workflow creator (or the last person to publish it)
- In SharePoint 2013 workflows, use app steps for a similar result. App steps run the steps within them as “workflow” which should be given full control permissions. See this post for more information on setting up app steps.
- If your workflow has multiple stages, your workflow may fail if you have “conditional” transition steps such as “If status equals approved go to Stage 4 else go to Stage 3”. Try eliminating conditional transitions and using if/then statements instead within a single app step to see if the transitions were causing the error.
- Item-level permissions
- If your workflow includes setting item-level permissions, try moving that step after the initial steps so that other steps can complete as the workflow initiator before their permissions are changed.
- Make sure out-of-the-box item-level permissions are set correctly so workflow initiators can see/access all items and not just the ones they created. A workflow initiator would need cancel checkout permissions to see any item-level restricted items.
- Make sure the item/document is checked in
- Make sure the item does indeed exist and hasn’t, in fact, been deleted by a user or workflow