Wait for Condition in Workflow

Kyle Wiley · ‎04-09-2017

We currently have a Wait For Condition in a workflow that is waiting for an inbound email action to kick off, changing a field value in the RITM to true. Once the field value changes to True, the workflow advances and creates the next Catalog Task. The problem is that the email action might never fire, meaning someone either "fat fingered" the inbound email so it is evaluated improperly or the item the user is ordering might have been rejected in the external approval system that some of our items have to pass through, resulting in no email being generated.

I would like to have some sort of Timer/Condition that waits for X amount of time before ending the workflow if the Wait for Condition never fires but I don't want to end the workflow if the Wait for Condition DOES fire and the workflow continues.

What would be the best way to accomplish this? I tried a Timer condition running along side of the Wait for Condition but the Wait for Condition was Cancelled and the Timer ended immediately.

Stephen Farrar · ‎04-09-2017

Hi Kyle,

My suggestion would be to try replacing your wait for condition with a run script, a turnstile and a timer.

Your run script can check whether your condition has been met, and if so move on - transition as you are already in your workflow.

If the condition is not met, it can transition to a turnstile activity - you can configure that with the number of times you want to check your condition. Lets say 24 times.

Then connect the turnstile to a timer that waits the interval you want to wait, lets say 5 minutes. After the interval, it will transition back to your run script to check again.

You also connect the turnstile to your end condition - or whatever you want to happen if the timeout is exceeded. In this case we check up to 24 times waiting 5 minutes in between each - giving you a timeout of 2 hours.

So in effect you'll have

Run script (wait for condition)

-> Success (condition met) -> what it does currently

-> Failure (condition not met)

-> Turnstile (have we checked enough times yet?)

-> No -> Timer (5mins) -> Back to run script

-> Yes -> End condition.

Let me know if that works out for you or if you have any questions on using those activities.

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Kyle Wiley · ‎01-16-2019

There are a couple of ways I believe you could accomplish this as well.

If you are creating the Change Request within the RITM workflow AND the Change Request has it's own workflow that is kicked off, you should be able to create a Run Script block within the Change Workflow to close the open Change Task that triggers once the Change Approval occurs.

If you all do not have a workflow attached to the Change Request, you would need to build in some type of Turnstile/Timer/Wait Condition combination to run a time-based check on the Change Request to see the status of the approval. If it is still pending, loop it back around and check it daily, hourly, whatever timeframe you want. If it is approved, move the workflow forward. You will need to use a Run Script to query the Change Task to know which one to close but that is the logic.

Depending on your setup, those are the routes I would go.