Auto Complete Recursive/Waiting Workflows – Microsoft CRM 4

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides very powerful workflow designer tools to create workflows for various business scenarios. Waiting workflows are one of them. Very often, it is required to create waiting workflow on dates. So if a date is changed the waiting workflow remains in waiting state and date change executes another waiting workflow. So this aggregation of workflows affects CRM Server performance and application functionality.

Recently I have created a custom workflow activity to kill these waiting workflows in a recursive workflow. So I would like to share my experience with all of you.

I am in a condition to create a waiting workflow to reschedule my activity periodically i.e. recurring appointments, Auto Reorder (Sales Order) etc. My workflow is fired on Create of activity/Order and on change of Next Due date/Next Order Date. So if the user has changed Next Due Date or Next Order Date, the workflows in waiting remains in waiting and also a new Waiting workflow is fired. My aim is to kill the existing workflow as it is invalid now and start a new waiting workflow with updated information.

My workflow name is Auto Reschedule Activity. Here is the description of my workflow:

Start:

                Wait for Next Due Date == Today

                                Reschedule Activity Accordingly

                                Recursive Call: Auto Reschedule Activity

End

What i am looking for is:

Start:

                Check if there is an existing workflow with same Workflow ID, Entity ID and in Waiting State.

                                Then Kill that workflow.

                Wait for Next Due Date == Today

                                Reschedule Activity Accordingly

                                Recursive Call: Auto Reschedule Activity

End

So I started with a custom Activity to fetch workflows in waiting state with same name and regardingobjectid:

I created a query object in my custom workflow activity:

QueryExpression query = new QueryExpression();

query.EntityName = “asyncoperation”;

 query.ColumnSet = cols;

And created 3 conditions as below:

ConditionExpression c1 = new ConditionExpression();

c1.AttributeName = “name”;

c1.Operator = ConditionOperator.Equal;

c1.Values = new Object[] {‘My workflow Name’}; //Workflow

ConditionExpression c2 = new ConditionExpression();

C2.AttributeName = “statecode”;

C2.Operator = ConditionOperator.Equal;

C2.Values = new Object[] {1}; //Waiting

ConditionExpression c3 = new ConditionExpression();

C3.AttributeName = “regadingobjectid”;

C3.Operator = ConditionOperator.Equal;

C3.Values = new Object[] {context. PrimaryEntityId}; //Waiting

So now I have all the waiting workflows regarding my activity. Ideally there will be only one workflow in waiting state all the time. This workflow will be responsible for rescheduling.

So now is the time to kill the outdated workflow. So here is the code for setting that workflow complete/cancelled.

foreach (BusinessEntity be in bec.BusinessEntities)

{

                    asyncoperation async = (asyncoperation)be;

                    async.statecode = new AsyncOperationStateInfo();

                    async.statecode.Value = AsyncOperationState.Completed;

                    service.Update(async);

}

You can improve this workflow utility to add lot more functionality to workflow designer.