Workflow task "completes", but not fully

[crosato]

So, we made some updates to a workflow, which testing out completely fine on our dev/int boxes, but on production it gets to a certain task and once you hit complete it still just sits running on that task. You can see it sitting there, in the workflow monitor, and the tasks status is running and there are no errors anywhere.

I have a listener that gets called on post_modify, and for every workflow step it gets called (usually doing nothing) but it also never gets called after the user hits complete on the task, which confirms that the task is just sitting in no mans land. I've checked the catalina and MS logs, and there's nothing in any of them. No errors or warnings - nothing. It literally seems like the user did not hit complete, but I saw him do it, and there's no active task for it anywhere in the UI.

Any ideas?

[ddemay]

Did you check that there are no java script errors? Clicking a button with
Ajax based pages these days means absolutely nothing. Need to see client
side in browser, and UI actually HTTP "posts" back to the server.



Is your production environment clustered? If so, more than one codebase?



Did you check your queue for exceptions in details of entries? If you are
using transitions? Exception handling? Does workflow terminate if it fails
- is it set to this? Have you decompiled any code defined for workflow
(wt/workflow/work/.etc.) to see how it got generated in the class file
format? Have added a string variable and string buffer variable to whole
workflow, and when an error is caught, output a copy of the stack trace to
the java string, look at running process to see what it says?



I'm not a big fan of listeners. Some sites overuse them. Any
synchronization robots in flow? It is quite possible to lose an event
(threading) and not have it make its way to all potential listeners.

[crosato]

Did you check that there are no java script errors? Clicking a button with
Ajax based pages these days means absolutely nothing. Need to see client
side in browser, and UI actually HTTP "posts" back to the server.

Yeah, I used firebug to see and saw no errors. I've been able to narrow the issue down more, and it's actually the participants applet. In this particular task I have a custom task form template, and also gave the user the ability to add/remove participants to groups for the task immediately following. I realized that the work item is being removed from the system as soon as the user saves the participant updates. I've confirmed this by just running a simple query before and after this bug. I tried recreating the exact issue on dev/int and have had absolutely no luck. So the problem is that at the point the user completes the task, there isn't even a task to complete anymore.

Is your production environment clustered? If so, more than one codebase?

Yeah, but my WC admin went through it all, and sent me the files. Everything is the same on each.

I will probably separate out the participants from the task form, since there are no issues like this with any of the other setup tasks. The one difference between this setup participant and others is that it's one of those that does not have the applet load when the page is opened. You need to click the dual head icon to load.