Who is this article for?

Users wanting to understand more about workflows.

No special access or permissions are needed.

As your processes develop, you may find that you end up with a group of different workflows launching from each other. This is referred to as a 'family' of workflows.

This article explains the impact of this setup in more detail.

1. Impact of workflow families

When you end up with a selection of workflows that work off each other, such as a Grandparent workflow launching a Parent workflow, which in turn launches Children workflows, you may run into 'issues'.

This is particularly true for 'Data copier' and 'Wait on workflow' steps.

Example

Grandparent workflow is Internal Audit - Management

Parent workflow is Internal Audit

--Wait on workflow on Parent (waits on Children to complete)

Child workflow is Risk Assessment for Internal Audit

--Data copier on Children

This is expected behaviour. Data copier will find all instances for the specified workflow definition in that 'family' of workflows.

If you add 'Wait on workflow' to the Parent workflow as well, this can cause cases where data is not copied back to instances.

We confirmed this via testing and found that this is because the Grandparent workflow launches again before all the Child workflows are copied back to the Parent and closed.

Further reading

• Aha! Feature Request - 2871 
• Previous tickets - 60736, 52037, 48756