Tridion 2011 Workflow thread life

Question

We are implementing a workflow in 2011 SP1 that has email generation and some activities that require the system to wait.

Example: User changes content and moved for approval. We send an email to the next user to let them know they need to approve. If the user does not finish the activity in a set amount of time, we send a reminder email to them that they need to finish. We are also throwing translation in the mix and are waiting for the translation to finish before publishing all languages.

What happens to the thread when the Workflow Service stops? When the server is rebooted? Does the service start the thread back up and continue where it left off? Is there a way to keep the state of the thread?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Before answering your question, I would state the following...

It looks like you are thinking of just putting your thread to sleep for a period of time, and then carrying on with a workflow activity at a later time. I would strongly recommend against doing this. As I think you may have guessed, this thread will die eventually, and break your workflow process.

As for email, take a look at the Tridion Notification Project at https://code.google.com/p/tridion-notification-framework/ This may give you some ideas why actually sending notification emails directly from the workflow is often not a good idea either.

If I was going to tackle you project, I would consider building a separate workflow management service (similar to the one in the above mentioned framework) which polls the active workflow items, and either automatically notifies them of "needs attention" items. The Notification framework can do all of the above by sending people emails daily of what has been is still in their assignment and work items lists. They can also control how regularly they get the emails. If you need more info, watch the notification framework of this webinar: http://webinars.julianwraith.com/2012/10/03/november-2012-webinar/

Finally, if you want to ignore all of the above, and have an option to upgrade to Tridion 2013, it has Suspend and Resume functions in workflow which my solve your challenge.