Workflow Soluiton

I need to come up with a way to do Workflow approval tasks from a mobile device when the approver is not on our intranet. I added mailto links for 'Approved' and 'Rejected' to the approval request email. When either is selected, the new email subject has the WorkflowTaskID embedded. I then created a monitoring project to monitor emails sent in via this process that would hit an HTTP Get component to invoke the Workflow's approval task.

What I am running into with the projects published to the server is a (401) Unauthorized error when the HTTP Get component tries to invoke the Workflow approval task. It worked fine in debug but does not when published to the server since the Workflow project has Windows Authentication enabled. I have specified valid credentials in the General tab of the HTTP Get component but it doesn't seem to be attempting to use those.

Does anyone know how I can get around the authentication issue with the HTTP Get component or know of a better way to programmatically invoke the task? We are on Workflow 7.1 SP2 and the workflow project uses a default task source (we don't use Process Manager).

Thanks!

In IIS, set the authorization of the "approval" workflow to be Anonymous. Maybe that will help.

Thanks for the reply. I should have mentioned that I tried setting it to anonymous during my testing and it works. The problem is the approval Workflow needs to be set to Windows Authentication so I can use Get Current User components to gather the logged-in users at various places throughout the workflow.

Could you use the Get HTTP Request Value component and specify AUTH_USER or LOGON_USER to instead get the user name? (trying to think of a workaround)

Unfortunately the Get HTTP Request Value (for either  AUTH_USER or LOGON_USER) comes up blank for me when the project is set to Anonymous Authentication.

So let me try this again after my last response didn't save..

We ran into a project where we need offline approvals and went about it the same way you are. I seem to remember running into the exact issue with the http get component.

So in my monitoring project I set the HTTP Get component to Default under the general tab. I then set the project properties to Windows Authentication. From there I created a separate app pool for the monitoring project and specified a user account. I made sure that user account had access to the workflow project and everything was able to run under windows authentication.

Thanks b3tts32! Once I set the monitoring project from Anonymous to Windows Authentication and the HTTP Get component from using credentials to "default", it is now working running under the app pool user account!