Question

Email Causes forms Process To Crash

Forms

Updated April 8, 2021

asked on March 15, 2021 • Show version history

Hi,

I currently run Rio 10.2 and I have issues with failing emails. I know this seems to be an age ole problem with Laserfiche and it is sort of resolved with 10.4 but unfortunately I don't have that luxury at the moment,

I have a form that has three stages and each stage a user is sent an email to notify them that the stage has been completed. Unfortunately if the email task crashes which it seems to do every now and then, the form crashes full stop and suspends.

To get around this I used a parallel gateway to spawn the email one way and terminate the branch once completed and the other gateway branch carried on completing the forms process with regards to the other stages. This strategy works in the respect that if the forms task crashes the rest of the business process completes due to the parallel branching.

My only problem with this method is that although the business process completes when emails fail to send the form, it is still shown up in the monitor as suspended. It is still a better option than the form not completing and I know I can cancel the suspended form knowing it has been archived. But surely there has to be a way. I have looked at catch events but they don't seem to work on failed tasks.

These forms are currently on over a dozen instances of Laserfiche each with their own email server and different accounts. If the email task fails and the user doesn't get an email I can live with that but having to go through all the instances to cancel suspended forms is starting to become a pain.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

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Replies

replied on March 16, 2021

Hi Mark,

Since Forms 10.4, we have added quite a few new features to solve issues like the one you ran into:

In Forms 10.4.2, added the ability to Interrupt, Retry, and Skip process steps in active Forms process instances(https://support.laserfiche.com/kb/1014083/list-of-changes-for-laserfiche-forms-10-4-2). With this feature you can skip the suspended email service task and continue the following steps.
In Forms 10.4.3, added the ability to send an email notification when a process is suspended(https://support.laserfiche.com/kb/1014114/list-of-changes-for-laserfiche-forms-10-4-3). With this feature, you can set up email notification on the process to notify you when the instance suspended.
In Forms 11, added the ability to update the variable value for in progress instance(https://support.laserfiche.com/kb/1014265/list-of-changes-for-laserfiche-forms-11). With this feature, if the email service task suspended because of the variable value used in email service task doesn't have the correct value, you can update the variable from Monitor page and retry the email service task.

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replied on March 16, 2021

Hi Xiuhong,

Thanks for the reply. I understand there is functionality in 10.4 that could probably help with my problem and believe me I would use it if I could. Unfortunately at the moment I don't have the manpower and time to migrate 15 yachts to Laserfiche 10.4 (forms, workflow, server etc) and retrain all the crew on the differences between 10.2 and 10.4. The differences may be subtle to us that administrate, install Laserfiche but to a rotational crew you have to go through why a certain tab has moved or is different, and why things are not visually the same.

We will get around to upgrading but at the moment we will have to stay on 10.2.

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replied on March 15, 2021

I occassionally have emails cause Forms to show suspended as well (Avante 10.2). In my experience, restarting the Forms Routing Service on the server will usually resolve the process and trigger the forms to send the emails and resume processing.

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replied on March 16, 2021

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately that wouldn't help my situation. When my form has suspended it is usually because it has completed but a couple of parallel lines with regards to emails have failed. If I was to restart the service and all the failed emails restarted then they would be out of context as the permit has completed, this would just confuse them.

The forms are on board yachts that act as separate Laserfiche entities, I don't have the resources to monitor the forms regularly, they also expire after 24 hours, that is why I have adopted the method I'm using. I can live without some of the notifications not going through so long as the business process carries on issuing the tasks. The problem comes when I have to spend time clearing out suspended forms from the forms monitor as it give a false indication of what has actually fallen. over.

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replied on April 8, 2021

I have a similar issue with Forms sending email. I have one specific email task in one specific forms process that repeatedly suspends when attempting to send an email to /initiator. It's frequent but semi-random. When I retry the email task it usually works.

Sometimes it takes care of itself automatically. I'll get an email alert about the suspended task, and when I check on it the email will have gone through on its own shortly after the alert about the suspended task was sent to me.

In older versions of Forms the fix was to delete and recreate the specific task that was causing problems. Does that still work as a solution for tasks that frequently and mysteriously suspend in 10.4.5?

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Email Causes forms Process To Crash

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