Question

Process Modeler - Exclusive Gateway Order of Conditions

Forms Version 9

Updated January 9, 2014

asked on January 8, 2014

In Forms 9.1 I have an approval process that feeds into an Exclusive Gateway that has 3 outflow paths. I understand that the conditions for each path should be unique but in this situation I have a path for employees of department A, a path for employees of department B, and a path for the managers of either department A and department B so it goes to their manager. The third path's conditions are the manager's hard coded last names. Employees in department A or B work fine. Whereas a manager of department A shows as being an employee of department A and thus goes down that path instead of the path for the department managers. I understand I can add conditions in paths A & B to solve the issue but this question is more to understand the order of events. What is the order that conditions are checked when using an Exclusive Gateway? Is it the order they are added and is their an easy way to re-order them?

1 0

Answer

APPROVED ANSWER SELECTED ANSWER

replied on January 8, 2014 • Show version history

Exclusive Gateways evaluate outflow path conditions based on the order in which the outflow object was created. So, if you want outflow paths to be evaluated in a certain order, you should create those outflow objects in that order, and the gateway will function as you expect it to.

If you created your "Send to Approval" outflow object first, for example, that outflow path's conditions would be evaluated first.

The best way to handle this is to ensure that your conditions are exclusive. You can do this by creating more complex conditions using the operators in the conditional expression builder.

3 0

replied on January 9, 2014 • Show version history

Thank you for answering the order used by Forms when evaluating these outflow conditions on Exclusive Gateways. It would be handy in a future release if we had the ability re-order these so we could get them to function in a similar manner to Routing Decisions in Workflow. Thanks again for the info.

0 0

replied on January 9, 2014

You're welcome! Adding this functionality is definitely something we're going to consider.

0 0

Replies

replied on January 8, 2014

you will need to add the hardcoded names into the expression that is evaluated to determine which path to take, that seems to be the simplest way of handling it. Otherwise, I recommend using two gates to send any other users to this current gateway and the hardcoded users to another part of the process.

0 0

replied on January 8, 2014

I ended up splitting it into two gateways and that works fine. I just wanted to know the order that Forms uses when evaluating these conditions so I can utilize it going forward. With Workflow I can use a routing decision knowing that it works left to right so I am hoping to know the method Forms' exclusive gateway uses for the same purpose.

0 0

replied on January 8, 2014

That is actually a very valid question. That's something we would find out in documentation and in a CPP class but no CPP class exists yet.

I hope to also find out the answer to this

0 0

You are not allowed to follow up in this post.

Question

Question

Process Modeler - Exclusive Gateway Order of Conditions

Answer

Replies

Sign in to reply to this post.