wftask prob

Has anyone else had problems with any of the $task->GetXXXXX() calls in that they returns a NULL values.
I have a 20 step workflow and the second to last step is to audit every thing that has gone on.
To do this i find out all the information i can about the job and write that off to a SQL db. I then go on to the task side of things.
I do
$tasks = $Job->GetTasks();
foreach $task (@$tasks)
{
my $eachTaskID = $task->GetId();
my $taskName = $task->GetName();
my $taskType = $task->GetType();
my $taskOwner = $task->GetOwner();
etc....
}

and write that information off to the database. The audit step also does one or two other things.

However when its going ronud the task loop occasionaly the GetName, GetType and a few others (but not GetId) come back empty. Looking into the wftask modules i notice that ID does not call refresh() but the others do. This in turn means that they all call iwgetwfobj. When it does find these NULL values it ultimatly leads to a crash of the teamsite server. When it does crash a Dr Watson runs and iwgetwfobj is listed as the last file to be executed.

I am not asking for a fix as support are looking into it, i was just wondering if anyone else had seen anything like this?

Hazzie
TS 5.5.2 on NT.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

thrivent_greg

I've had similar experiences. However, since I haven't been able to reproduce the problem on demand and don't really have the time to dig into it yet, I've removed all my audit logic for now.

Another problem I've reallized with the GetTasks is when you have a rather large number of tasks in a workflow and then have a large number of files in the workflow's filelist. Each task object maintains its own copy of the file list. Thus, if the file list has a couple thousand files in it, it consumes a large amount of memory and brings TeamSite response time to a crawl. We're running WIN2k on a quad processor, 4gb mem, I'd be curious if this is also problem on the UNIX installations or if this is specific to WIN2k.

Adam Stoller

Generally speaking if you get a list of tasks from a workflow object - all the tasks should be "valid" - but you can always verify using
if ($task->IsValid()){ ... }
which I believe will invoke the refresh() function.

Also note that not all task types support all methods - specifically, I do not believe that dummytasks support GetOwner().

If you're planning to push the information into a DB - you might consider using a XML parser on the output of iwgetwfobj -r jobid rather than making all the separate GetXXX() calls - I believe you will find it generally more efficient as most of the GetXXX calls utilize CLT's which therefore require additional overhead to invoke the CLT process. By using iwgetwfobj once you get all the data and then the XML parsing routine can extract the parts you want and formulate (hopefully) a single DB interaction to store the information....

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)