Parallel Gateway based on variable/form input.

asked on October 5, 2022

Hi all,

Still wrapping my head around gateways, so I must be missing something. Basically I want to allow users to pick their approving manager for the flow. If they leave it blank, I want to skip past that required approval path. In this example I have 2 managers.

I'm getting stuck in 2 places.

1. The gateway seems to ignore the condition for Manager 1, so regardless if its blank it goes through.

2. If I try to use the input for the Manager 1 field as the user the task gets assigned to, it spits out an error. (I have found another helpful post on here to help me extract LF user accounts so that is fine) however it does not seem to like a blank field. I guess this would be ok as if I can get the gateway working properly it would not even activate this task.

What am I missing here? Any help appreciated!

Thanks

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SELECTED ANSWER

replied on October 6, 2022

A parallel gateway always follows all paths. Try using an inclusive gateway which only follows paths with a true condition, or keep the parallel as it is and add an exclusive gateway before the Manager 1 user task with a skip path.

Also I think that last Exclusive Gateway working to collapse your parallel paths back into a single path should likely match the original gateway type. So it should be a parallel gateway. Not 100% sure if this is required but that was the way I learned.

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replied on October 6, 2022

The merging gateway does not need to match the gateway that split the paths. Using the same gateways on the split and the merge may make it easier to process in a way that makes sense, but it isn't strictly required, and there are situations where you may want a different gateway type on the merge.

Here's how the three gateway types handle merging:

An exclusive gateway will allow each incoming path to proceed onward as it reaching the gateway. So multiple active paths incoming will result in multiple active paths outgoing.

An inclusive gateway will check for all active incoming paths and wait for all of them before proceeding. So multiple incoming paths will result in only one outgoing path.

A parallel gateway will wait for all incoming paths before proceeding. So multiple incoming paths will result in only one outgoing path. But if for some reason one of the incoming paths isn't active, it won't proceed past the merging gateway as it is still waiting for the incoming path that isn't active.

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replied on October 6, 2022

This means his exclusive gateway is going to cause an issue, it will not collaspe the 2 paths back into one.

My experience with the parallel gateway acting as a collapse function is that it only counts the number of incoming pings (paths that hit it) until it equals the number of outgoing paths from the opening parallel gateway. This means you can have more paths that branch within and they do not all need to lead to the parallel and some of the initial paths do not even need to lead back to it, as long as it receives as many pings as there was initial outgoing paths from the start.

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Parallel Gateway based on variable/form input.

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