Work item for an automated activity(BOF Module) is getting moved to a "A Paused" state

Hi,

I have workflow with a BOFmodule activity that does a heafty task of validating thousands of documents. When the BOF method was running, after few minutes workitem which is acquired state gets moved to "A Paused" state. But in the workflow method completes successfully and an exception is thrown when the transition attempt to the next activity is made.

javax.servlet.ServletException: DfException:: THREAD: http-0.0.0.0-9084-1; MSG: [DM_WORKFLOW_E_WORKITEM_TRANSITION]error: "Workitem (4a00000280001904) fails to make the state transition."; ERRORCODE: 100; NEXT: DfException:: THREAD: http-0.0.0.0-9084-1; MSG: [DM_WORKFLOW_E_ACTION_NOT_ALLOWED]error: "This operation is not allowed when the state is 'paused' for workitem '4a00000280001904'."; ERRORCODE: 100; NEXT: null
at com.documentum.mthdservlet.DoMethod.invokeMethod(Unknown Source)

As per the CS reference manual, I understand that transition to "Finished" state is allowed only from "Acquired" state. Since the workitem is in paused state an exception is thrown.

The same workflow runs fine when the no. of documents to validate is less. I am not sure what is causing the workitem to move to "A Paused" (Acquired Paused) state.

Any help will be great as this is show stopper on our project.

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Comments

clonak

To Saravanan:

Thank you for the posting.

I noticed your workflow question is highly technical - therefore, I have moved it to the Developer Community.

This community is amazing. They will help you soon I'm sure.

Best regards,

Kelly

tusharinamdar

Hi Saravanan,

It looks like your the BOF Module activity is timing out due to the large number of documents it has to validate. In such a case, the auto workitem is put in a paused state to indicate failure. In general, automatic tasks should not take longer than the method timeout you have configured. So I can suggest a couple of ways:

1. Increase the method timeout value for you BOF Module activity from the default 60 seconds to a reasonable number.

2. If that does not work, you can implement a way to asynchronously launch the document validation process via a method and have it "call back" to the workflow so that it can proceed. One way of achieving this call back is by using the "HTTP Inbound Step" activity.

Please give these a try in that order and let us know what works.

Tushar.

saravanans

Hi Tushar,

Thanks for your time and the reply.

I tried the option 1 by settting the timeout on the activity to a larger value (say 100 mins) but still activity is getting moved to "A Paused" state in 5 mins. Could there be any other reason for this to happen?

I am not able to understand option 2 as can you pls. elaborate a bit on that. I can will try that as well.

Thanks again,

Saravanan

saravanans

Thanks Kelley for moving it to the right community

saravanans

Hi Tushar,

The issue is resolved by setting the (default, max) timeout values of the BPS Java Method BPSIntegrationMethod by directly changing it using Composer. The value we set in the Activity configuration UI-.Performer-> Method timeout (e.g BOF Module) is not used by the workflow as the timeout for the workflow method. Hence, irrespective of the method timeout value I set in the activity UI, it times out after 300secs (default max value of the BPSIntegrationMethod).

I am not sure whether this is happening for all, but happens for BOF Module activity that uses BPSIntegrationMethod as the entry point.

We are using D6.5 SP1 and this is reproducible. I am not sure this bug still exists in later service pack version(SP2).

Thanks.

Saravanan

saravanans

Today i did a detailed analysis on the time out issue with the workflow and the findings are as given below.

In case of automatic activities in BPM, it has two time outs

1. Activity Method timeout, this is configured through BPM UI at activity level and this is a single value. This can be changed by the workflow designer.
2. Java Method time out configured at the time of method creation ( min, default and max values). This is given by developer of the method.

In my case, it is the BOFModule. Many such kind of out of the box automatic activities provided by documentum uses a common entry point Java Method called BPSIntegration provided by documentum that comes with Process Builder DAR files.

OTB the default time out values (min, Def and Max) for this BPSIntegration Java Method is set as 60,100 and 300 secs. This value is not known to the workflow designe,r who uses this method indirectly by using any of the automated activities provided by Documentum. In this case it is the BOFModule activity.

As a user of BOFModule, we set the activity time out value to say 3600 mins(1 hour) etc. When the workflow runs two time outs gets scheduled.

a. Activity timeout at 1 hour
b. Underlying Java Method at 300 secs(5 mins).

Let us say, when the task runs for as long as 360 secs, (beyond the 300 mark) timeout (b) kicks in and times-out as this occurs earlier than the timeout(a).!!(voila)

To solve this issue, i have set the Java Method time out(b) be to a larger value( say 10 hours) so that it does not occur before (a) and works as desired by the workflow designer.

Unfortunately, this method BPSIntegration, get placed in across different dars that has worflow. And if any one of such DAR is deployed the value will be reset to default value specified in that DAR and we will hit the same issue.

Thanks,
Saravanan