SharePoint: The State Service

Normally, one wouldn’t be writing this blog post. Normally, one wouldn’t be looking for the information contained in this blog post either. See, usually when you do the installation of SharePoint, you run the Configuration Wizard and the end and tell it to set up all of the basic services. We didn’t do it that way.

In fact, we manually set up all of our service applications so that we had complete control over what application pools they were assigned to, what they were named, and what database (if any) was created to support them. This worked splendidly for all of the service applications that have a constructor accessible via the Central Administration interface. As you may have already surmised by the content of this article thus far, the State Service does not. The only way to created a State Service application (and associated proxy) is to either create it using the configuration wizard, or create it via PowerShell.

Using the configuration wizard will create the service and create the application proxy and create the application database using the farm SQL server. This is perfect if you don’t really care what things are named or where they are stored. I don’t like to do things that way.

When you use PowerShell, you have control over the name of the service application, the name of the application proxy and the name and location of the database file. Below is the code to create the State Service application.

$serviceApp = New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name "State Service"
New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name "StateServiceDatabase" `
-ServiceApplication $serviceApp
New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -Name "State Service" `
-ServiceApplication $serviceApp -DefaultProxyGroup

The following site contains this information as well as the instructions on how to do this using Central Administration and the farm configuration wizard. http://www.topsharepoint.com/sharepoint-2010-state-service