I was researching an easy way to remove a bunch of workflow variables without having to spend my afternoon in a full blown SPD click torture session.  My thought was to edit the XOML directly, which is the XML file underlying SPD’s declarative workflows.  This is how I found it.

First, go to the All Files option under Site Objects in Navigation.  You need appropriate permissions to see this, so if it’s missing for you, appeal to the right admin person to grant you the priv.  This is what it looks like:

All Files shows a list of … all the files:

Select the Workflows folder and you see a list of folders for each workflow:

Click into the correct folder and  you see a listing of all the interesting goodies that make up an SPD declarative workflow.  Right click on the .xoml file and select “Open With –> SharePoint Designer (Open as XML)” to edit the XOML directly:

You may want to do a manual backup before you fiddle with things.  A regular copy/paste of the file directly in SPD is probably good enough, or you can copy paste the entire XML text and save it onto your desktop or whatever is your wont in these cases.

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