Workflow Parameter Limitation

Jeremy

Teamsite 6.1 SP2
Solaris

Hi,

We seem to have come upon an issue with Teamsite and the way it handles files in a workflow.
Basically we have a very simple workflow (I simplified it through trying to figure this out) to which we attach as many as 1400 files.
This is a lot of files, but I just suspected the workflow would be a little slow to process everything. It works fine until it comes to the external task. It doesn't even attempt to kick it off. Debug logs that are at the begining of the script do not run.
The external task runs fine when only 10 files are attached.

We found the following error in the iwtrace logs:

[Tue Nov 1 04:48:58 2005] Too many arguments for command /web/soft/iw-home/local/mellon_custom/default/bin/unlock.ipl (args: 1322, max: 510)

Now in my code I'm not pulling the files off of the list of parameters (as we know Teamsite sends wfid taskid areapath filelist to a script).
I'm using the $task->GetFiles(); which shouldn't worry about the list of parameters as it should be finding the files from the Teamsite "Workflow Database". Would that be a correct assumption?

Anyway, the work around I came up with was to write the complete filelist to a single file (in the WF instantiation phase) which is then attached to the workflow. This single file is then opened and the complete list of files is read in each external task.

My question is why does Teamsite send the filelist if there is a limitation on the number of parameters and when those files can be pulled from the Task object?

Has anyone seen this before? I'm not too upset about this as it actually make the rest of the workflow run a little quicker as there is only one file attached!

Thanks for listening!

Jeremy

Johnny

It's a real pain that files were ever passed in as parameters.

GetFiles() is the correct way to do this, but teamsite still passes them as parameters - I guess for compatibility reasons - though it should be long gone.

You need to take a look at this iw.cfg setting

[workflow]
## Set 'external_task_add_filelist' to false if you want to prevent
## TeamSite from adding files to the command line of external task
## command callouts.  Defaults to true if not specified.
#external_task_add_filelist=false

John Cuiuli