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Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Real time workflows, child workflows and actions

Posted on by Microsoft Employee

Hi All,

I've got an interesting symptom where I have a real time workflow which calls another RT child workflow, which updates a record, and the parent step immediately after the return from the child workflow tests and fails to see the update. In fact this challenges my understanding of RT workflows so much I can hardly believe I haven't made some obscure mistake.

The update is however displayed via the UI, obviously after a delay many orders of magnitude greater than the time it takes to start executing that next step test in the parent workflow....??

Both workflows have the same record as their context - the child is really just a "subroutine" with some common "code" in it - perfect situation to use an Action really, but a child workflow requires less fiddling.

In order to resolve the problem quickly I intended to re-enter the child steps in the main workflow to avoid the workflow failure this symptom causes (they do work there), but was deterred by the tedium of retyping all the steps a number of times over - there are two or more other places needing this set of steps.

So I retyped the child workflow as an Action (first time ever actually, have never found a need), and guess what, the Action does exactly the same, it updates the record but the calling workflow does not see the result, which does subsequently appear in the UI as expected. In this test I passed the record as an entity reference input, but tested using the calling workflow record context after the Action executed.

Finally to cover all bases, I then created an output entity reference in the Action, and compared results in the calling workflow after the Action had executed, and now the calling workflow can see the changes....not in the calling workflow record context, but in the output reference record.

Is this a bug or a misunderstanding on my part? Anyone care to comment?

Cheers,

Mike

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