Flow issue: Possibly linked to do the following in parallel?

[annastocks]

I have a working flow which I have copied for a new request item which has a slightly different routing with tasks, but my flow seems to break either immediately on saving a copy. If I edit the original flow with the changes I need and test it (without saving), the "new" flow works. I don't want to click save or I'll overwrite my original flow, which we still need. I therefore needed to either create a copy and edit it for the new request item, or start from scratch.

To summarise, the flow:

Trigger:

Catalog item requested.

Actions:

1. Update request item assignment group.

2. Grab catalog variables

## Fulfillment stage entered ##

3. Do the following in parallel:

4-5. --- Create a catalog task

6-7. --- Check if specific variable is set to yes

8. --- --- If the above is yes, create another catalog task.

9. Run a subflow to check for manual tasks and that they're all closed.

## Completed stage entered ##

10. Log to close workflow.

If I:

- Copy the existing working flow and immediately test without any changes, so it's absolutely identical to the original, the flow appears to already be broken (screenshot attached).

- Copy the existing flow and make identical changes to my initial test, the flow appears broken.

- Create a brand new flow, add all the steps in whilst testing each time I make a change,  the flow breaks as soon as I add in the step to do the following in parallel, even if it's identical to the original flow. As soon as I take out the parallel step, the flow works again. 

I identified the flow wasn't right because:

1. When running the flow test, the completed stage appears in a big golden bar instead of grey, and there's only one stage at the top instead of two.

2. When completing the tasks, the request doesn't flow to complete.

I have checked a multitude of things, but specifically:

1. All flows have been created in the Global application scope.

2. All flows are being run as system user. 

3. All flows have the same stages, and I've tried removing and re-adding them on my test flows.

4. Tested running the original flow, new identical copy flow, new modified copy flow, and newly created from scratch flow (with and without the parallel step) all on the same RITM (and others) to make sure it wasn't an issue there. The original flow works fine, as does any copy/new flow without the parallel step, the others all fall down at the same spot.

Where have I gone wrong here?

[edosky]

Hi Anna, 

Have you figured out the fix for this issue? We had a flow where the completed stage was working before the xanadu upgrade. But after the upgrade the completed stage now highlights in yellow for the flow context, tried removing the "Do the following in Parallel" action and it reverted back to greyed highlight when not yet triggered. Thank you

[annastocks]

Hi Edosky.

I ended up logging a ticket with ServiceNow and they confirmed it's linked to a known bug with the parallel action that is meant to be fixed in Xanadu. I'm currently weighing up when to upgrade (currently on Washington DC), but the description of what you're seeing worries me a bit! Sounds like you may also need to log a ticket - I'd be keen to hear the outcome of your issue as a lot of our flows use this function. 

The workaround for us until we upgrade is to log a ticket with ServiceNow any time we create a new workflow with this function and then again when we push it from development to production. Copying a workflow with the fix applied to create a new flow does not work either - it has to be done for each flow sadly.

Hope this is helpful,

Anna

[edosky]

Hi Anna, 

 
Thank you for the response, we did receive the same response and I believe the fix is targeted on Xanadu Patch 2 and Yokohama, in the meantime, there is two options we've tried, first was migrating the parallel action to a subflow, which solves the issue but will need effort if you have a lot of flows to check (this allows the stage to still show up as complete), or create an update ritm which sets the stage to complete, which should automatically close the REQ should automatically close (this closes the REQ but the stage for completed will not show up)