Increase timeout of workflow manager HTTP Get requests
We have a large number of customers who are using our custom workflow actions in SharePoint Online to automate document conversions. This works quite well, but we have recently identified a problem where HTTP requests in declarative workflow actions are set to a very short time out.
When running on-premise this setting can be tweaked via PowerShell by modifying 'WorkflowServiceMaxHttpResponseTime' (See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj680843(v=azure.10).aspx). However there appears to be no way to control this in SharePoint Online.
Now, the default 1 minute time-out may seem long, but quite a few operations take longer than a minute, e.g. merging multiple files together, carrying out OCR, etc.
All the heavy duty processing happens on our back-end servers, so don't impact SharePoint Online's front-end & Workflow Manager servers, we just need a more reasonable timeout.
AdminSharePoint UserVoice Admin
(SharePoint UserVoice Admin, Microsoft SharePoint)
responded
This is by design. Long running operations such as doc assembly or OCR should be done using an async pattern using WaitForCustomEvent/PublishCustomEvent
See these links for reference:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/microsoft.sharepoint.workflowservices.workflowinstanceservice.publishcustomevent.aspx
https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/officeapps/SharePoint-2013-Route-25a25d87
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/publishing-custom-events-to-sharepoint-2013-workflows
