The mysterious case of the disappearing workflows

Uncle Rob · ‎12-05-2016

I have a custom task type that generates a workflow. In a 3 year old solution, about once a year, a bunch of tasks appear to lose their workflow context.

So two questions:

1) Has anyone experienced either spontaneous droppage of a WF context *OR* a WF context not created for a record that so obviously me the criteria?

2) Is there any way to report on tasks that do not have a workflow context?

oharel · ‎12-09-2016

I had a similar issue and contacted HI (running Eureka). They said:

"There is an OOB Table Clean-up job set-up for all workflow context older than 180 days. This will delete all finished or ended workflow context in your instance if the context has ended after around 15M seconds or 180 days.

From Fuji version we have disabled this table clean-up job out-of-the-box."

harel

View solution in original post

ohhgr · ‎12-05-2016

Hi Robert,

Actually, I've seen this behavior before. There were a couple of RITMs that were updated after a couple of years and therefore, new workflows were triggered for them. After further analysis, we found that the workflow context was removed (archived, may be) after a couple of years and that reattached new workflows to those records.

However, I don't seem to find this information anywhere on the Wiki/Docs.

-Mandar

Uncle Rob · ‎12-08-2016

This is so weird. These records *CLEARLY* have run a workflow as they have approval data attached. But the fact they have a second set of approval data shows the workflow has either been replaced or re-run.

Uncle Rob · ‎12-08-2016

Other news. I took the same record as above (where we know an approval process ran on Jan 4, 2016. I copied the record's sys_id and checked against all Workflow Contexts. Only got one result...

TADA. The only active workflow context was created on the same date as the new approvals.

WT-ACTUAL-F is going on here?

Community Alums · ‎12-09-2016

I know that reference fields sometimes appear blank even when they have a sys_id if the display field is incorrect, or otherwise messed up. Is there just one that appears to have a blank workflow context? Are any reference fields appearing blank, but when you check the value, they have sys_id's?

Uncle Rob · ‎12-09-2016

Ok. I just verified that older instances of ServiceNow had an Auto Flush configured for Workflow Contexts. Any completed WF context over 6 months old got wiped. This was inactivated by default on newer (post E?) releases, but anyone coming before that has it active.

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