In this video, I'm going to demonstrate how using the “Collect from Data” action in SharePoint Designer can sometimes be a little bit buggy and not accept the changes that you're looking to make. In this example, I have this “Collect Approval” by clicking on the “Collect Approval,” it will first warn you that it might break any custom workflows and you'll go through and try to make the changes.
In this case, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make it so “Approved” is not the default value and then we also don't want it to accept any blank values. I make those changes. I'm going to double click through it again, because I've notice that this may sometimes make our change go through, and what it'll then do is when you click finish, it will actually run through that same dialog box again so you know that if you've gotten that second one come up again then your changes will come through. If you've noticed that you make changes to your workflow the changes aren't taking any effect, try double clicking through them.
Now you'll see we can actually make those changes go as we wanted to and you’ll see the desired effect when you run the Workflow in SharePoint Designer. I'll go ahead and demonstrate it one more time using another collect data from user action in this workflow. Here I found another one. The dialog box comes up letting you know that it'll break any custom running instances. Go to “Modify,” I'm doing the same thing. I'm making it so “Approved” is not the default value and we don't want any blanks values and again you'll see it come again. Make those changes a second time and this way you know that your actual changes are going to come through.
Again, if you don't see that dialog box happen twice and you're having a problem of SharePoint Designer not accepting your changes, try just double clicking through as many of these as you can to make it show up a second time or you might actually have to delete the cached website information, or the DLL, from your local computer. Thanks.