I have a real-time workflow for creating unique numbers. This workflow get a numeric field from my custom entity, increase it by 1, and update it for next use.
I want to run this workflow on multiple records.
Running on-demand mode, it works fine,and I have true and unique numbers, but for "Record is Created" mode, it dose not work fine and get repeated numbers.
What I have to do?
This approach wont work, when the workflow runs on demand its running multi-threaded, e.g. two users create two records, two instances of the workflow start. As there is no locking mechanism you end up with duplicated numbers.
I'm guessing this isn't happening when running on demand because you are running as a single user.
You will need to implement a custom auto number approach, such as Auto Number for DynamicsCRM.
Disclaimer: I work for Gap Consulting who produce the tool linked above.
Related
When I create a ParametersVariation simulation, the main model does not run. All I see is the default UI with iterations completed and replication. My end goal (as with most people) is to have a model go through a certain number of replications, but nothing is even running. There is limited documentation available on this. Please advise.
This is how Parameters Variation is intended to work. If you're running 1000 runs and multiple replications with parallel runs, how can you see what's happening in Main in each?
Typically, the best way to benefit from such an experiment is to track the results of each run using elements from the Analysis palette or even better to export results to Excel or similar.
To be able to collect data, you need to write your code in Java actions fields with root. to access elements in main (or top-level agent).
Check the example below, where after each run a variable from main is added to a dataset in the Parameters Variation experiment. At the end of 100 runs for example, the dataset will have 100 values of the main variable, with 1 value for each run.
I'm planning to introduce linting into a rather massive code base. Fixing all existing issues beforehand is not possible, so seeing thousands of linter errors at start is inevitable.
I'd like to record the number of detected errors each time the build runs for master and treat this number as a success / failure threshold. If a new pull request does not exceed the current baseline, its pipeline passes and so the proposed change is good to go. However, if the number of errors increases, I'd like the pipeline to fail, thus preventing the merge.
This functionality I’ve described narrows down to writing variables to Azure DevOps servers as some side-effects of builds and also reading these values from the previous build. This looks very similar to comparing code coverage, however, I can't seem to find any docs on how to implement the read-write logic manually.
What pipeline task could I use? What else can I leverage to track a custom metric over a number of builds and compare the value with previous? To summarise, my ultimate goal is to gradually lower an arbitrary value from a large number to zero over the course of several months.
I want to run a plug-in every 30 minutes, to poll an external system for changes. I am in CRM Online, so I don't have ready access to a scheduling engine.
To run the plug-in, I have a 'trigger' entity with a timezone independent date-
Updating the field also triggers a workflow, which in pseudocode has this logic:
If (Trigger_WaitUntil >= [Process-Execution Time])
{
Timeout until Trigger:WaitUntil
{
Set Trigger_WaitUntil to [Process-Execution Time] + 30 minutes
Stop Workflow with status of: Succeeded
}
}
If Trigger_WaitUntil < [Process-Execution Time])
{
Send email //Tell an admin that the recurring task has self-terminated
Stop Workflow with status of: Canceled
}
So, the behaviour I expect is that every 30 minutes, the 'WaitUntil' field gets updated (and the Plug-in and workflow get triggered again); unless the WaitUntil date is before the Execution time, in which case stop the workflow.
However, 4 hours or so later (probably 8 executions, although I haven't verified that yet) I get an infinite loop warning "This workflow job was canceled because the workflow that started it included an infinite loop. Correct the workflow logic and try again. For information about workflow".
My question is why? Do workflows have a correlation id like plug-ins, which is being carried through to the child workflow? If so, is there anyway I can prevent this, whilst maintaining the current basic mechanism of using a single trigger record to manage the schedule (I've seen other solutions in which workflows create new records, but then you've got to go round tidying up the old trigger records as well)
Yes, this behavior is well-known. The only way to implement recurring workflows without issues with infinite loops in Dynamics CRM and using only OOB features is usage of Bulk Deletion functionality. This article describes how to implement it - http://www.crmsoftwareblog.com/2012/08/using-the-bulk-deletion-process-to-schedule-recurring-workflows/
UPD: If you want to run your code every 30 mins then you will have to create 48 bulkdelete jobs with correspond startdatetime like 12:00, 12: 30, 1:00 ...
The current supported method for CRM is to use the Azure Scheduler.
Excerpt:
create a Web API application to communicate with CRM and our external
provider running on a shared (free) Azure web site and also utilize
the Azure Scheduler to manage the recurrence pattern.
The free version of the Azure Scheduler limits us to execution no more
than once an hour and a maximum of 5 jobs. If you have a lot going on
$20 a month will get you executions every minute and up to 50 jobs -
which sounds like a pretty good deal.
so if you wanted every 30 minutes, you could create two jobs, one on the half hour, and one on the hour.
The Bulk Deletion is an interesting work around and something we've used before. It creates extra work and maintenance though so I try to avoid it if possible.
I would generally recommend building a windows application and using the windows scheduling feature (I know you said you don't have a scheduler available but this is often forgotten). This approach works really well and is very easy to troubleshoot. Writing to logs and sending error email alerts is pretty easy to make it robust. The server doesn't need to be accessible externally, it only needs to reach CRM. If you had CRM on-prem, you could just use the same server.
Azure Scheduler is a great suggestion. This keeps you in the cloud which is nice.
SSIS is another option if you already have KingswaySoft or Cozy Roc in place.
You could build a workflow that creates another record and cleans up after itself; however, this is really using the wrong tool for the job. Also, it's very easy for it to fail and then not initiate the next record.
There is a solution called "Scheduled Workflow Runner". You create a FetchXML query to create a record set to run against, and point it at an on-demand workflow that you want it to run on each record.
http://alexanderdevelopment.net/post/2013/05/18/scheduling-recurring-dynamics-crm-workflows-with-fetchxml/
(I have also posted this question at math.stackexchange.com because I'm not sure where it should belong.)
I have a system with the following inputs:
Set of work items to be completed. These are variable sized. They do not have to be completed in any particular order.
Historical data as to how long work items have taken to complete in the past. However, past performance is no guarantee of future success! That is, once we come to actually execute a work item, we may find that it takes longer or shorter than it has previously.
There can be work items that I have never seen before and hence have no historical data about.
Work items further have a "classification" of "parallel" or "serial".
Set of "agents" which are capable of picking up a work item and working on it. The number of agents is fixed and known in advance. An agent can only work on one work item at a time.
Set of "servers" against which the agents execute work items. Servers have different capabilities. Specifically, they are capable of handling different numbers of agents simultaneously.
Rules:
If a server is being using to execute a "serial" work item, it cannot simultaneously be used to execute any other work item.
Provided a server isn't being used to execute any "serial" work items, it can simultaneously handle as many agents as it is capable of, all executing "parallel" work items.
There are a handful of work items which must be executed against a specific server (although any agent can do that). These work items are "parallel", if that matters. (It may be easier to ignore this rule for now!)
Requirement:
Given the inputs and rules above, I need to execute the set of work items "as quickly as possible". Since we cannot know how long a work item will take until it is complete, we cannot possibly hope to derive a perfect solution up front (I suppose), so "as quickly as possible" means not manifestly doing something stupid like just using one agent to execute each work item one by one!
Historically, I've had a very simple round-robin algorithm and simply sorted the work items by descending historical duration such that the longest running work items get scheduled sooner and, hopefully, at the end of the cycle I'm able to keep all agents and servers reasonably well loaded with short-duration work items. This has resulted in a pretty good "square" shape to the utilization graph with no long tail of long-duration work items hanging around at the end of the cycle.
This historical algorithm, however, has required me to pre-configure the number of agents and servers and pre-allocate work items to "pools" and assign pools to servers, and lots of other horrible stuff. I now need to support a dynamic number of agents and servers without having to reconfigure things. (Note that the number of servers will be fixed during a cycle - that is, the number will only change between cycles - but the number of agents may increase or decrease in the middle of the cycle.)
Once all work items are complete, we record how long each work item took to feed in to the next cycle and start again from the beginning!
The result of SqlWorkflowInstanceStore.WaitForEvents does not tell me what type of workflow is runnable. The constructor of WorkflowApplication takes a workflow definition, and at a minimum, I need to be able to store a workflow ID in the store and query it, so that I can determine which workflow definition to load for the WorkflowApplication.
I also don't want to create a SqlWorkflowInstanceStore for each custom workflow type, since there may be thousands of different workflows.
I thought about trying to use WorkflowServiceHost, but not every workflow has a Receive activity and I don't think it is feasible to have thousands of WorkflowServiceHosts running, each supporting a different workflow type.
Ideally, I just want to query the database for a runnable workflow, determine its workflow definition ID, load the appropriate XAML from a workflow definition table, instantiate WorkflowApplication with the workflow definition, and call LoadRunnableInstance().
I would like to have a way to correlate which workflow is related to a given HasRunnableWorkflowEvent raised by the SqlWorkflowInstanceStore (along with the custom workflow definition ID), or have an alternate way of supporting potentially thousands of different custom workflow types created at runtime. I must also load balance the execution of workflows across multiple application servers.
There's a free product from Microsoft that does pretty much everything you say there, and then some. Oh, and it's excellent too.
Windows Server AppFabric. No, not Azure.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/app-main.aspx
-Oisin