Strange UI behavior with customized PLC workflow

WGM

I've customized the out of the box PLC in TeamSite 7.41. to do the following:

Attach Dependencies

Optionally GenerateHTML

Validate Files

Submit Files

and send Job Complete Email

See attached image.

When I invoked the workflow for a file via the submit button, it appears to process OK and I nearly instantly receive the job complete e-mail.

However, the UI transitions to a page that requests:

Task Comments

and radio buttons for Job Complete Email Success and Job Complete Email Failure

When you click next you receive the following error:

Task Job Complete Email (74532) cannot be finished, because it is no longer active.

I'd rather forego the e-mail step but when the Submit Files Success link is connected directly to the End Job node, the Validating files message in the UI never closes even though the job completes.

I'm trying understand how the workflow UI works and have read a lot of documentation and messages here but it is very unclear. I suspect the 7.4.1 docs don't have the same level of information as prior versions and the old document seems orient towards PERL based workflow development.

Any clarity on this or documentation refernce would be greatly appreciated.

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Comments

Rick Poulin

Sounds like the issue is that you have a bunch of CGI tasks and none of them has the proper logic to know when the workflow switches to a backend operation. There should be no UI in the browser for the submit and notification tasks, so whatever task comes before these should print a "Success!" or "Done!" message rather than transitioning to /iw-cc/transitiontask?taskid=1234.

If you built CGI wrappers around those tasks, then the same logic applies except you'll want to update your final (notification) task to stop instead of attempting to transition to a task that doesn't exist.

WGM

Thanks, still not sure I understand.

All the tasks are "stolen" from the PLC. I copied the PLC and cut out what I didn't need to ensure I was starting with things that work.

So is there something in the PLC that knows when to transition to the backend so that the UI sequence stops at the correct place?

Or is there some generalized mechanism it uses to "end" the UI sequence?

Thanks.

Rick Poulin

In the ootb PLC, the only CGI task that "knows" how to end the sequence is the deployment task (which is noticeably absent from your list). In this case, you might want to insert a CGI task before your submit, which does nothing more than print the success message to the user and transition the workflow in the backend.

WGM

Thank you. Based on your previous response, I just noticed that the Deployment task in the PLC has

ImmediateTransition=false and

SuccessMessage= some intelligent message

I'll mark your last response as the solution.

However, do you know what behavior ImmediateTransition=false controls?

I tried to set it to false on the Validation ask in my modiified workflow but didn't see any change in the behavior.

Many of the tasks in the PLC has that set to true and only the Deployment task sets it to false.

Rick Poulin

I think HP originally intended for all PLC tasks to know what to do when ImmediateTransition=false. In reality, only the deployment task has that logic actually built-in.

You could probably enhance the validation task to respond to this flag, but in your particular scenario, I think it's easier and more maintainable in the long run to have a "dumb" CGI task end the chain.

WGM

Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to help me and others.

Snap 2016-01-19 at 16.56.46.png

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