Recently I needed to simulate a future lapse in time in order to manually trigger the “Pause Until” SharePoint Designer function. In the example below, the SharePoint server is a local DEV virtual machine running in Oracle VirtualBox. That means it receives time from the parent machine.
Action Steps
- Move VM host clock forward 1 day (24hours)
- Move VM guest clock forward 1 day (24 hours)
- Run the Powershell command “Get-SPTimerJob | ? {$_.name –like ‘*workf*’} | Start-SPTimerJob”
What the above steps will do is to simulate a future date and then trigger the SharePoint workflow engine. If the engine finds any past-due activities (ex: “Pause Until ___”) then it will execute those immediately. Using this technique you can build “Pause Until ___” workflows and still test them to ensure everything completes as expected, without having to actually wait the full time.
