Forms Cloud - No More Parallel Collapse Gateways?

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replied on May 4, 2021 • Show version history

You can still use parallels to merge branches. It might be getting tricked a bit by the opening exclusive without a separate close. For your top branch, try putting an exclusive gateway after the two tasks to merge those, THEN put that into the parallel.

A merging parallel means it waits for ALL incoming branches to be complete before moving on. Since in this example the top user task was never done, it's stuck waiting for it. A merging inclusive gateway would probably do what you want since the top branch was never active, but really my first suggestion of merging the top branch with an exclusive then passing that into the parallel is best practice.

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replied on May 5, 2021

I just tried this if I understood right and it worked.

I am confused about what this means though, how can you merge something that is "Exclusive". There would never be anything to merge. I know I have used Exclusive gateways many times within a parallel like this, seems something has changed.

It gets me going here though, thank you!

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replied on May 5, 2021 • Show version history

Exclusive gateway merge just lets any incoming branch immediately through. Because you split using an exclusive, only one branch will be active and it will pass through the merge right away. The best rule of thumb is to always split and then merge with the same gateway. Here you have an internal split/merge with exclusive and the external split/merge with parallel so follows the best practice.

And yes, evaluation for merging gateways has changed slightly. This was due to being able to retry an active merging gateway. Retrying an active gateway will reassess whether the branches are complete to determine whether to move along or continue waiting. When retrying an active parallel gateway, it looks at all incoming branches and evaluates whether they are complete. In your case, the top branch is not complete (since it was never active) and thus it waits. The second exclusive gateway means the parallel merge only checks for two branches, both of which have been completed.

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replied on May 5, 2021

I did not realized Exclusive could split paths, only parallel and conditional parallel gateways.

I might be drawing 2 or more paths, but only 1 should ever be taken ever, so in the past there was never any reason to collapse/merge multiple paths and 1 gateway was ever needed.

The parallel merge used to just check the number of paths coming out of the previous parallel and match it up with the number of paths hitting the merging parallel. When the count matched, it would continue, regardless of how many paths are drawn in between.

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Forms Cloud - No More Parallel Collapse Gateways?

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