Look Up Record output ("Record") becomes empty after Wait Until Date/Time action

[HarishKumar6668]

Hi Community,

I have used the following steps in a  flow:

Catalog Item Submitted
        ↓
Look Up Record
        ↓
Wait until Future Date/Time
        ↓
If Condition

I am observing two scenarios:

Scenario 1: If the future date is the same date as the Catalog Item submission, the Look Up Record output is available after the Wait, and the If condition is evaluated as expected.

Scenario 2: If the future date is an actual future date, the Look Up Record initially returns a record, but after the Wait completes, the Record output is empty in the Flow Context. As a result, the If condition returns false because there is no record available to evaluate.

Please refer below screenshots of the flow and Flow Context .

Is this expected behaviour in Flow Designer? Any insights or confirmation would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Harish

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@HarishKumar6668 

this looks to be OOTB behavior, check KB0859427

My suggestion

-> Do not rely on a Look Up Record result from before a Wait.

-> Instead perform a fresh lookup after the Wait step

But better to raise a case with ServiceNow just to confirm

💡 If my response helped, please mark it as correct ✅ and close the thread 🔒— this helps future readers find the solution faster! 🙏

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@HarishKumar6668 

Just following up to see whether my suggested solution/comment worked for you.

If you're still facing any issues, I'd be happy to help further.

[HarishKumar6668]

Hi @Ankur Bawiskar ,

Thanks for your response.

The issue is not with Flow Designer. I dug deeper into the issue and found that the table I am looking up is a custom table. The previous developer configured a Scheduled Data Collection Job to populate this table.

Since the table does not have a unique field, the Scheduled Data Collection Job deletes all existing records and inserts the latest data each time it runs.

As a result, if the lookup is performed on the same day before the Scheduled Data Collection Job runs, the reference record is still available in the database and the lookup works as expected.

However, if the lookup is for a future date, the corresponding record may already have been removed during the previous data refresh. Therefore, we cannot reliably use the output from the Look Up Record action, as the required reference record may no longer exist in the table.

Regards,
Harish

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@HarishKumar6668 

then this is not a platform issue but data thing as table is getting cleaned up

💡 If my response helped, please mark it as correct ✅ and close the thread 🔒— this helps future readers find the solution faster! 🙏