Running Workflows during upgrade

achukwuka · ‎Dec 01, 2009

Hello Gurus,

I wanted to get a feel for how anyone out there is handing "Running" workflow during the 9.1 upgrade. I know the PTC upgrade guide says to allow these running workflow process time to complete execution. However, there are always processes that are running and what do you do if you can't wait for these to complete. One thought I had was to actually set these running processes to a different state i.e "severe" and then set them back to ready post-upgrade. I am not however sure yet if this will not cause a problem post upgrade.

I am interested in finding out how the rest of you are handling this. All suggestions are welcomed.

Best,

Alexius C. Chukwuka
IT Analyst, PDP Systems
John Deere Power Systems
Product Engineering Center
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ddemay · ‎Dec 01, 2009

Well an import question about your workflows/system to know an answer to is
whether or not your workflows use any customizations? Any external code,
transitions, etc. The workflows will continue to use the template
definition with which the running instances were created against. To ease
your worries, one of the best ways to test this out is to have a test server
setup and import an exported copy of the workflow that currently has running
processes. Check the method server log for output. It should complain about
any incompatibilities you might encounter during the actual upgrade. Then
you need to actually execute the process on the test server. During the
upgrade you'll probably have your queues shut off? I can't remember if
that's a step or not someone else can correct me but that would halt any
running processes of course. I think personally PTC uses that as a catch
all to say we told you so. A lot of sites have the same issue during an
upgrade.

_____

avillanueva · ‎Dec 01, 2009

Ok, we just did this a few weeks ago. Since the workflow tasks changed
to JSP templates. I had 40 workflows that would no longer function due
to customizations. I redid my customizations as JSP templates so I had
to restart these workflows. Some were past a certain point which meant
they were ok to continue. With those severe task, this was the most
frustrating thing since the queue jobs do not have any visible
relationship to the workflows they were tied to. Its hard to know what
they do. We did have a lot that were failures do to set state on
changeables. If we just continued past those, the job was still in the
queue. When we tried to clear those, we just set them to ready. Well,
some of those were set states to change to Under Review. As a result a
whole bunch of released items got changed back to Under Review. Took us
a bit to realized the error but we decided to just delete the severe
jobs next time around.

ksreeniv · ‎Dec 01, 2009

Run the Evolvability Diagnostic Utility. If it does not find issues, you
should be OK with migrating running workflows. If it finds issues, log a
call with PTC. I am assuming there is no customized code.

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 9:23 AM, Villanueva, Antonio <
-> wrote:

> Ok, we just did this a few weeks ago. Since the workflow tasks changed to
> JSP templates. I had 40 workflows that would no longer function due to
> customizations. I redid my customizations as JSP templates so I had to
> restart these workflows. Some were past a certain point which meant they
> were ok to continue. With those severe task, this was the most frustrating
> thing since the queue jobs do not have any visible relationship to the
> workflows they were tied to. Its hard to know what they do. We did have a
> lot that were failures do to set state on changeables. If we just continued
> past those, the job was still in the queue. When we tried to clear those,
> we just set them to ready. Well, some of those were set states to change to
> Under Review. As a result a whole bunch of released items got changed back
> to Under Review. Took us a bit to realized the error but we decided to just
> delete the severe jobs next time around.
>
>

phartwig · ‎Dec 01, 2009

Alexius,

In addition, if you are comfortable with creating Windchill customizations, it is possible to export the expressions to external java files which then can be updated to the new java api's. You would need to write an export tool using the WTDefinerhelper.service.compileExpression method and set wt.workflow.definer.deleteExpressionFiles=false and wt.workflow.definer.exprFileDir=<expression file=" location="> in the wt.properties file. Then update the java files containing the expressions until no compile errors are returned. Then test, test, test.

Paul Hartwig

MikeLockwood · ‎Dec 01, 2009

When we upgraded from 8 >> 9 last December we only had workflows for Promotion requests and a few projectlink document routings - so we manually dealt with bringing all to a completed or rejected state and had none that had to carry over. We're interested in what others do here for the future.