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Author Submit workflow hanging

Dori

We have an author submit workflow that we've been using without problem for several years. In the last few weeks, the jobs have suddenly started hanging about half the time. We haven’t made any recent changes to our configuration.

TeamSite 6.1 SP2 Build 43683

Symptoms:

1. The author submits their files. In the Workflow tab, the approver sees the Task Description as “Please complete this task” instead of “Need approval for author’s content.” , and is unable to approve the task. We have to kill the job and ask the author to re-submit the files.

2. The author submits the files and the approver is able to Approve them. However, the workflow hangs at this point. The Task Description says “Send Email to the Author after Submit”. The files don’t get submitted to STAGING and no email is sent.

I've attached a PDF with some screen shots.

Actions taken:

We followed KB 54739 Hanging External Tasks and renamed the iwprocessd.arena file and workflow folder. We also completely shutdown the server and restarted it. That didn’t fix the problem.

We did see this problem for a day or two back in December, but it magically went away.

Do you have any suggestions on other things we can check?

dori

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Comments

nipper

No PDF is attached.

Can you determine which task is hanging ? From your description it sounds as if it is in the approver step. But then later you mention the email step.

Dori

Oops, the PDF was too large. Here are a couple of .GIFs. We suspect it's hanging around the emails.

nipper

Yea it looks to be email.

That appears to use the iw_solution_email.ipl. That, in debug mode, creates a log $iwhome/tmp/iw_solutions_debug.txt Check to see if that file exists.

If not you need to turn on debug, by editing iwhome/local/config/wft/solutions/iw_solution_email.ipl and change the DEBUG and VERBOSE variables from 0 to 1.

** DON'T FORGET TO TURN THIS OFF WHEN YOU FIX IT -- VERBOSE IS VERY VERBOSE **

Then rerun.

Post your log when you get one.

Dori

IWOV Consulting customized our workflow. Author submit workflow is using /iw-home/bin/iwsend_servlet_mailv5.ipl. Would these be the correct changes to the iwsend_servlet_mailv5.ipl file?

---------- beginning of code excerpt ------------
######################################################################
# Appends arguments to STDERR and to a file called $debug_output
# if $debug_output is non-empty.
######################################################################
sub debug
{
if (($debug_output) || $debug)
{
# Output to screen
print STDERR "@_\n";

# Output to webpage
#print "@_
\n";

# Output to file
my $debug_output = "/beta/interwoven/iw-home/tmp/iwsend_mail.log";

# Just return if it fails to open debug file
open (OUT, ">>$debug_output") || return;
print OUT "@_\n";
close OUT;
}
}

---------- end of code excerpt ------------

And is this the correct location in the .ipl file to turn on verbose?

---------- beginning of code excerpt ------------
####
# User Configurable Options - May be overwritten by passed parameters
####
my $debug = 1; # 0 - Off, 1 - On
my($def_body) = "has assigned a TeamSite task to you. (Job ****).";

---------- end of code excerpt ------------

Adam Stoller

IWOV Consulting customized our workflow. Author submit workflow is using /iw-home/bin/iwsend_servlet_mailv5.ipl. Would these be the correct changes to the iwsend_servlet_mailv5.ipl file?

I do not know about the 'v5' version of this script - but the basic version of this script is not all that well written in terms of robustness and use within a workflow context such that there are any number of ways the code could exit without transitioning the workflow.

The best way to debug it is to invoke it from the command line with the appropriate command line arguments, which as near as I can tell by looking at the code I have handy would be something like this:

iwperl -d iw-home/bin/iwsend_servlet_mail.ipl taskname to_addr jobid taskid areavpath

Where

Run it through the debugger, stepping through each line of code until you figure out where it's dying.Or switch to using either iwsend_mail.ipl or iw_solution_email.ipl - both of which are better written and better supported.

Dori

I turned logging on. The attached log shows one success workflow (job 683) and two failed (713 and 725). On the failed jobs, both completed step one (attach DCR) OK, and got stuck in the "Please complete this task step" (tasks 715 and 727 respectively). After the two failures, we had a couple of successes.

From what I can tell, the iwsend_servlet_mailv5.ipl is a customization of iwsend_mail.ipl. Interwoven Consulting set this up for us. This has been working fine for years. I'd prefer to get this working reliably again and not change scripts. We don't have an inhouse developer right now, so we're really limping along trying to get this resolved.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Dori

I *think* we may have resolved the issue but we need to do more testing. Our IT dept. just changed the email routing in the /etc/hosts file on our TeamSite server so that it points directly to the IP address of our MS Exchange server. Mail was being routed out to the internet to go through our two spam filters. This takes a minimum of 5 minutes to go through the filters, so we think the email delay was causing a time-out of the workflow.

Now the emails are flying out in about 10 seconds.

I'll give an update tomorrow.

Dori

By passing the spam filters appears to have fixed the problem.

QUESTION: Is there a time-out parameter for emails in workflows? If so, what and where?

If there is, I'd like to adjust it up.

Thanks.

dori

Adam Stoller

By passing the spam filters appears to have fixed the problem.

QUESTION: Is there a time-out parameter for emails in workflows? If so, what and where?

If there is, I'd like to adjust it up.

Thanks.

dori

There's nothing specific about emails to adjust in workflow - but you can write your own script (or modify a copy of one of the OOTB scripts to get all the information, compose the message, do the callback and then send the email ... this way the workflow will continue on without waiting for the email to be sent ... or is that not what you were looking to do?

Dori

Thanks for the suggestion. We'll keep that in mind for the future. Everything seems to be working great now, so we're not going to mess with success.

Thanks to you and nipper for the help!

dori