When workflows stall, they get stuck on the stage that caused the issue. Many times over it is useful to start the workflow from the start – a complete re-run.
But there is no way to do that in the UI – you can only unstall the workflow to start execution from the same stage. And that is not very useful.
Today I had to deal with a bunch of stalled workflows that had stalled stage removed (don’t ask me why – reasons!). And I did not fancy re-triggering these manually – these had to be done, otherwise I’d be loosing data. Long story short, here is a bit of SQL that will cause your stalled workflows to start from the first stage, not from the place where they got stuck:
update [dbo].[OC_WORKFLOWINSTANCESTACK]
set STAGEID = w.STARTSTAGE
from [dbo].[OC_WORKFLOWINSTANCES] wi
inner join [dbo].[OC_WORKFLOWINSTANCESTACK] s on s.INSTANCEID = wi.INSTANCEID
inner join dbo.OC_WORKFLOWS w on w.WORKFLOWID = wi.INITIALWORKFLOWID
where stalled = 1
and TRIGGERNAME='My failed trigger'