Flow Designer Notification Issues

[Joe75]

I'm having an issue with Flow Designer regarding Notifications and I was hoping someone out there can help.

The Application has multiple tables. However, the main tables are A and B where A is the parent. Both tables have two separate views. I have a Flow for View 1, this flow is triggered when Table B is updated and looks for one field to be changed to a specific value. When I was first testing this flow the Notifications within it were triggering twice. The cause was found in a BR that was updating that table. That business rule was removed and the issue of multiple notifications was fixed.

Now in making a Flow for View 2, which there are two Flows. The first Flow is triggered on Table A when a single field is updated, this changes values on the associated Table B(s) and triggers a single Notification. There are no issues with this flow. The 2nd Flow for View 2 is triggered on Table B just as it is for View 1 with the values on this one field being completely different. The issue is: the Notifications are triggering anywhere to 2 or 5 times! I can't find any business rules that are doing anything with Table B View 2; not too mention I turned them all off and retested to make sure.

I'm at my wits end for figuring out what is triggering the Notifications multiple times. I've added the Updated by, Updates, and Updated fields to see if the system was someone making the changes twice or more and causing these multiple notifications but, I can't find any evidence to support that.

Any one else have a similar issue out there or have any ideas on where i'm not looking that could be causing this to happen?

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

[deanproctor]

Hi Joe, 

This may help troubleshoot your issue:

Flow designer uses Triggered notifications. 

 

These are the types of notifications:

Engine:

Engine based notification trigger when a record is inserted or updated.  When these actions occur in the instance the notification engine runs and evaluates all notifications for the table in question and evaluates the conditions.  If the conditions pass then an event is created 'notification_engine.process'.  This event will have the notification sys_id as 'parm1' and the record sys_id as 'instance'.  The event processor will process these events and create the sys_email record (assuming valid recipients).

Event:

Business rules or other scripts create events.  When these events are processed, the event processor will look for notifications triggering off of the registered event, conditions are evaluated and if they pass the sys_email is created (assuming valid recipients).

Note: notice the "assuming valid recipients" for each of these.  This is a common reason emails are not created, no valid recipients.  This should be the first step in troubleshooting email creation from notifications.  There are two ways to troubleshoot this:

1. First and easiest is to use the "Notification Preview" on the notification. Select the record in question and view the recipients.  If they are all crossed out then an email would not be created for the record in question.  Hover over the crossed out recipients for the reason they are excluded.
2. Create the property 'glide.email.notification.save_when_no_recipients' and set it to 'true'.  Reproduce the issue and check for a sys_email with no recipients.  The email logs provide the reasons recipients were excluded. 

Triggered notifications are solely for use in the Flow Designer. Activating the Flow Designer plugin will add a 'triggered' sys_choice to the notification 'Send When'. These notifications have no conditions, as they will fire unconditionally when a flow is executed (provided there are no runtime errors during flow execution). 

Triggered based notifications will create notification_engine.process events.  Once these events are in place, troubleshooting is the same as Troubleshooting engine based notifications where this event is present.  No condition evaluation is done at the time these events are processed. It is only a question of recipients and content.

If this event is not present, check for errors in the FlowDesigner 'Flow Executions' tab and syslog entries where 'Source' is "AutomationHub".

Thanks

Dean