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Signal Throw & Catch Question

Forms Version 10

Updated October 9, 2020

posted on April 25, 2016

We are trying to find a better way to handle situations when more than 1 person needs to approve or reject a form submission. Below is the current setup:

In the above situation, an approval could be needed by more than 1 person. If it does go to more than person they can click on Approve or Reject buttons. We then have some JavaScript to detect if the Reject button is clicked and then inserts the word Rejected into a single line field. At the Approved or Denied 3 gateway, it evaluates if the word reject is present in that field.

With the release of Forms 10 and the Signal Throw & Catch events, would it be possible to use those to accomplish the same thing? I like to try and use the built in features of Forms as much as possible instead of custom code.

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replied on October 9, 2020

Hi Blake,

On your post you mentioned this: "We then have some JavaScript to detect if the Reject button is clicked and then inserts the word Rejected into a single line field." Would you be able to share the JavaScript?

In our scenario, if a reviewer rejects a form we want to stamp the form with "Rejected" (write "Rejected" into a field) before saving it to the repo or attaching it in an email notification to the form submitter.

Thank you for your time and help.

Best regards,

Jeff

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replied on April 7, 2017

I am trying to figure out how to do the same thing. The problem is, in my conditions there is no selections for previous signal events. The system can't even see which signal catch triggered the action. It only has last user action and the normal conditional stuff.

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posted on April 25, 2016

Here is a simplified flow that requires 3 Approvals or one rejection. Any rejection throws a reject signal. The rejection then cancels any pending approve/reject users tasks via the 'interrupt attached activity'.

Can do a lot with signals but they sure get the process diagram looking messy. Also don't forget you can add more than one signal catcher to a user task, that can be useful.

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replied on April 25, 2016

What would happen if someone approved and that path got to the Parallel Gateway and then someone at one of the other 2 User Tasks rejected it?

I'm guessing that would cause issues as the other 2 incoming paths for the Parallel Gateway would never get there and it would be put an endless waiting state?

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replied on April 25, 2016 • Show version history

I think somewhere, when it made sense in the flow, you could place a Terminate End Event, instead of just an End Event. I should have put that after the email events here. Good point

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replied on April 25, 2016

The problem is that it needs to be routed to a different user task if it is denied, so we are not able to use an end event.

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replied on April 25, 2016

I understand that, thus my 'somewhere' in the flow when it makes sense, use a terminate end event. And to that .... perhaps it would be a nice feature to have gateways pick up on signals as well as other tasks.

We are pretty new with LF here, but signals were an exciting addition that we have already seen. Must have been some hoops to jump through without them!

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replied on April 7, 2017

What is going on here? You don't have parallel gateway before the 3 user tasks you want to run in parallel. Then you have a parallel gateway after the tasks, with only 1 path protruding from it.

I thought the parallel gateway was used for running tasks in parallel, not receiving parallel paths and combining them back together.

Also there doesn't seem to be any conditions other than you rejected condition here. Where is the condition that all tasks are approved?

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replied on April 7, 2017

Chad, are you referring to mine or Andrews?

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replied on April 7, 2017

Andrews

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replied on April 7, 2017

He is missing a parallel gateway before it splits to the different approvers.

Gateways can be used to split routes and merge them back together. In the case of the parallel gateway, it will always expect all incoming paths to come back in, so has the possibility of not making it back, you need to account for that. See my screenshot above.

He is also missing the condition as you mentioned for if it was approved or denied.

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replied on April 7, 2017

OK That is COOL! I did not know that a parallel could work in 2 ways. The fact that it automatically waits for all streams to come back in before proceeding allows me to do the parallel tasks that I need to do.

I see in your case there is an issue because if someone declines at one step, you want to cancel all user tasks in the parallel and start a new user task.

I thought I saw this mentioned at empower as a 10.2 feature where you could throw a signal to an existing task but it seems the signal events can not be attached to tasks directly. So I don't know how you signal a task to end.

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replied on November 3, 2017

Blake, you could have your user task on the reject path and leave that initial acceptance on the parallel gateway. After the user task (and whatever else needs to happen on the reject) you could use a terminate end event to kill those threads stalled on the gateway.

If the reject branch is a simple flow, having a terminate at the end of it should be fine.

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Signal Throw & Catch Question

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