How do you get "restart" on a custom Playbook action to restart the flow attached to the activity?

[Matt Jones3]

I'm trying to figure out this whole playbooks thing, and create some custom Activities to use in a Playbook.

I've got the basics down.  Created a sub-flow that the activity calls.  Created the activity (modeled after "Instruction" OOTB activity).  Figured out how to adjust the flow so that Mark Complete triggers the action I want, and Skip skips it.  That's all working.

What I can't figure out how to do is get the Restart button to actually restart the Flow.  Currently it puts the Activity state back to In Progress, but when you Mark Complete the activity on the playbook, the flow isn't triggered.

I can see that this works with some OOTB activities like Update Record.  If I have an Update Record activity in my playbook, and it's complete, I can restart that activity and Mark Complete again, and the record is updated with the new values.  I'd like to do something similar in my custom activity, though instead of updating a record I want to call a REST service.  If the activity is initially skipped, or something went wrong, I'd like the end-users to have the ability to restart the Activity and complete it again.

[Matt Jones3]

Well, that's a bummer.  Thankfully we are planning on upgrading to Washington DC soon.

[Matt Jones3]

Ok, so now we _are_ on Washington DC, and trying to use the new restart functionality.  I enabled restart on the playbook by hitting enable after opening it, as per the documentation.  I also checked the "Allow this process to be restarted during runtime" checkbox on the process, and set restart rules on the stage and activities.  However, when I'm looking at the playbook either in the SOW or in the test viewer, I'm not see the ellipses with the restart option.

We upgraded the Process Automation Designer to v25.1.6.  Is there by chance a corresponding SOW related plugin that _also_ needs updated?

[Matt Jones3]

Found out we _also_ need to update the Playbook Experience plugin as well, that contains the UI piece for end-users to restart things.

Ok, so now I can restart playbooks, restart stages, and restart OOTB activities...but I'm not able to restart custom activities.  The elipses just don't show up on them, even when the activity is complete.  Is there something we have to do in the activity definition or the associated flow for restarts to work?

[yaronguez · Accepted solution]

Yes, you need to add a restart Declarative Action to your custom Activity definition. Scroll to the bottom of the activity definition form and click add in the Playbook Actions related list. Choose the restart_activity as the declarative action and the Playbook Experience field as Global Playbook Experience. 

[Matt Jones3]

Yup, that's exactly is.  I actually had those before upgrading to D.C., and took off because I didn't think they were needed.  Thanks for responding, hopefully this will help someone else down the road!