Need Your Advice to Help Us Shape Our Workflow TroubleShooter topic

[jman87]

     We are excited to develop a valuable Workflow Troubleshooter topic to enhance your self-help capabilities. Your insights are crucial to ensure it meets your needs!

     What workflow issue concerns you the most? Please let us know what you'd like to learn about. For example: Queue has failed entries, Sync robot is stuck, or user could not receive a task and so on.

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Best Wishes!

Teresa

[Fadel]

- Roles resolution

- Notification

- Workflow expressions  

- Workflows not starting 

[avillanueva]

Workflow with no active user tasks, Typically related to missed sync robot. 

User's knowing where something is in the process, if they do not have a task themselves, whose got the ball.

[d_graham]

@avillanueva , 

I did write a customization back in WC 8.0 nick named "Where's my stuff?" The tool was run from Quick Links menu.

This tool can be customized to whatever is desired, but I think the logic I used is a good starting point. Read on.

A page opens that listed all user alphabetically but default the current user, the user running the tool.

Upon submit it finds all valid ChangeRequest, ChangeOrder and PromotionRequest where the user was the Submitter or Creator or whatever role you want.

Valid meant the state of the object was not Resolved or Cancelled or Rejected.  You get the idea,

A table is then returned to the user displaying the process and the running robots (Synch, Expression, Activities, Method Robots) and the state.

If the active robot was an activity the user holding up the process was also displayed.

Everything displayed included hyperlink to the displayed object.

[jman87]

@d_graham Thanks for your sharing. Could you kindly please provide the customization code of "Where is my stuff"?

So appreciated for your congratulations!

Best Wishes!

Teresa

[apatil-2]

If similar sych robots are used in multiple sub processes (especially in QMS) not all will execute and they get struck. As a fix, we are adding the timer robots to control the synch robot execution.

[HelesicPetr]

Hi @jman87 

In my opinion the most important issue is if the workflow is stuck for any purpose. 

Workflow robot wants to change a state of object but the object is check-outed. 

Required task does not have a role resolution

custom synchronization robot  throw an error atc

Now days there is no way how to re-run re-set the actual workflow if there is any problem. You almost all situations you have to run new workflow. 

It is understandable, that the workflow has some iteration and you have to use the newest one but it would be nice to merge the old workflow with new version of workflow after some correction in the wf template.

PetrH

[arajagopal]

When we restart our Windchill cluster, the synchronization robo used in change activity workflow and change notice workflow don't work as expected. We are forced to reset the lifecycle state of both ECN and ECA to initial state to restart the workflows. This happens once a while but engineering users are stopped to proceed with some critical ECNs.

[joe_morton]

A few items come to mind:

• We manually run the "Search for Workflow Processes" weekly to check for any stalled workflows. It would be better to get more immediate notifications. We've looked into creating our own Data Monitors, but the workflow status is not stored in the database so it is not reportable.
• Often a robot can get stuck and the workflow does not show up as a stalled process
• In the Workflow Process Manager, when tasks are running or when a robot is running, there is highlighting to indicate that code there is running. Conditional blocks do not have any such indication. So if a workflow gets stuck on a Conditional block, it can be hard to determine exactly where it is stuck.
• Wish list items when editing workflows:
  • the ability to box select multiple nodes and move them would be a huge time saver. 
  • to keep workflows looking neat, it would be great to have an underlying grid and a snap to grid feature for node placement
• Better overdue tasks management. A nice option would be to send daily emails ongoing after a task is expired.

[Dobi]

A lot of similar comments to what's already been said:

- Workflows getting stuck in tasks when things are checked out

- Sync robots not behaving

- I'd love to have access to the Process Manager for non-admins (with some limited permissions) because right now that's the only place you can go to for more info on what's happened.