How do youget active flow executions to use updates added to the flow after the execution started?

[JR42]

I have active flow executions that are running because they were triggered by the creation of a survey.
I have since updated the flow, but, the pre-existing flow executions are still using the original flow, and not taking the changes that I made, into account.

Is there a way to get an existing flow execution to look at the updates made to the flow after the execution was created, and start using the updated flow?  If so, is there a way to do this for 300+ flow executions at the same time, or, all of the flow executions for a specific Flow?

My understanding is that I need to cancel all of the existing flow executions, then send out new surveys so that the updated flow is triggered by them.  I am looking for an easier solution that would not leave me with a ton of duplicate surveys.  I considered updating the flow trigger to include Updated, then going out and making a small update on the survey instances that I want the updated flow to trigger on.  Then going back and cancelling the flow executions that were running the old version of the flow.  However, the only field in the surveys that I can update is the assigned to, and that is not something I can do.

I was hoping that someone knows about a button in Flow Designer, within a Flow, that would tell ServiceNow to start using the updated Flow for all of the existing flow executions that are running.  In my case, the only thing I changed in the Flow was the length of time for a Wait action, so this would work if the button exists.

[DanielCordick · Accepted solution]

Hey Justin,

I don't believe there is something like that, I don't even think legacy workflow allowed this either. 

You are correct, you would need to cancel the old flow and then rerun with the updated flow, not an ideal situation. Even if you made a small update to the survey record it would run on the new flow and not the current old one.

Choices in this case would be to either cancel the flow then re run or keep the old flows running and going forward new surveys use the updated flow. kinda puts you between a rock and a hard place.

please mark helpful or correct 🙂 

[OlaN]

Hi,

I'm sorry, but there is no such feature. You will have to decide if you want to retrigger the already started flows, with the updated flow, or leave them be as is, and have all upcoming records execute the newer flow.

As to your specific issue, if you need to change the length of a wait-action, you could manually (or by scripting) change all the wait actions already generated by the old flow.

A wait-action creates a record in the sys_trigger table with name "flow.fire"
The field "Next action" specifies when the trigger should be executed, so you could manually change that value to increase or decrease the waiting-time.