New type of async business rule from Rome onwards - async_always. [async (deprecated: not run during upgrade)]

Daniel A-C
Tera Expert

async (deprecated: not run during upgrade)
This async rule is deprecated as it will NOT run during upgrade. It is recommended that you switch to the new 'async' option.

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I'm opening this thread to try to gather more information about this new annotation found on business rules in a Rome instance. The docs aren't particularly detailed and I find this message confusing. One of my colleagues interpreted this to mean that existing async rules won't run ever again after upgrading the instance to Rome and I must admit I had to read it a few times to get the idea.

Looking into it; I can see the choice values are now: 
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The new entry's value async_always would seem to suggest that these business rules will continue to be able to run, subject to actually being triggered in their normal way and having their conditions met, regardless of whether there is an upgrade currently in progress. I interpret this to probably mean any upgrade including hot fix, patch or family version but not plugins, update sets or app installs. (Would be great if anyone can confirm this?)

I will refer to these as value:async (the old one) and value:async_always (the new one) for the rest of this post to avoid confusion.

Does anyone know if this is because...

  1. Prior to Rome, value:async business rules didn't run whilst an upgrade was in progress
    or
  2. From Rome onwards, a change has been made and value:'async' business rules no longer run whilst an upgrade is in progress?

The Rome release notes for Core Platform say:

Core Now Platform highlights for the Rome release: Create async business rules that run automatically.

Important information for upgrading Core Now Platform to Rome: To avoid breaking a workflow, when you don't select the necessary async business rules to run during an upgrade. Newly created async business rules run automatically on an upgrade.

Where would you be selecting which async business rules to run during an upgrade? I don't think I've ever seen a prompt for that. Also this sentence is pretty hard to understand and could do with revision in my opinion.

Can anyone offer any more background information on how/why this change has been made?

Thanks in advance

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Have you seen this KB on the topic? I think it encloses a lot of nice information.

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Daniel A-C
Tera Expert

TLDR; as I understand

  • Business rules with value 'async' (old one) will not run, if triggered, whilst an upgrade is taking place but will be fine and will run, if triggered, once the upgrade has completed.

  • Business rules with value 'async_always' (new one) will run, if triggered, regardless of whether an upgrade is currently taking place and will also run, if triggered, once the upgrade has completed.

Docs, release notes and that annotation could be made clearer IMHO.

Have you seen this KB on the topic? I think it encloses a lot of nice information.

I had not seen that. That has got to be the best written KB article I’ve ever seen ServiceNow write. All my questions are answered now. Thanks Lorenzo!

Hmm, I'm not able to access that KB article. After clicking the link in the thread and logging in, I get a "Your role does not grant you access to this article" message.

Not only am I interested in this thread as we're about to upgrade to San Diego from Quebec, I would also love to read the "best written KB article..." from ServiceNow 🙂

Michael