I have a situation where we are assigning individual named users to a task from a database by role but the task isn't visible. When I look at the process instance, there is no error showing with the task itself except there are no assigned users showing in the assignment tab. Is there a limit to the number of individual users that can be assigned a task? The users are part of groups in Appian but the task is assigned to individual users instead of the group.
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What happens if you use the exact same rules/logic you're currently using for the assignment, but limit it to only 2 or 3 users? How many users are you attempting to assign at other times? I don't know about any particular hard limit for this, so I think the first thing to do is confirm that your configuration is actually doing what you expect it to do regardless of the size of the user list.
When its only 2 or 3 users the task is accessible. No issues observed. The number of users varies.
The task is accessible, and viewing the assignees in the Process Instance shows what you'd expect?
How about with 5 assignees? or 10? And can you clarify how many assignees you're attempting to use in the cases where you're having issues? It doesn't seem like you mentioned this.
In this particular case, we are assigning 12 users. I was trying to find out if there was a documented maximum number of users. I can figure out what the breaking point is. I just wanted know if that had already been established.
I'll admit it's a bit of an unusual use case to assign a task to loads of users individually, as usually it's easier to handle this either via group-based assignment or DB-assigned "pseudo" tasks.
However I'm unaware of any defined system-side limits to number of assignees on a single task. If you can reproduce a "break" at any specific number of users, I'd suggest you go ahead and open a support case for it, as it may be an actual bug.
I would also be surprised if there is some limitation here as low as say, 10 assignments for the same task. My assumption would be 1000.
In one of my processes for example, is a scenario that assigns multiple of the same tasks directly to a dynamic list of users - where the submitter can pick as many people they want to 'comment' on a submission, used for business development opportunities. How I handle this is by putting the comment task in a sub process, then start the sub process as MNI, one per assignee, set to not move on until all tasks have been completed. There is also a time constraint of a number of hours before an exception fires that ends any remaining tasks.
The sub process method allows you to perform any other processing around their tasks, and is also easier on your engines in the case of many tasks at once. With this setup, the limit would be 1000 tasks.
For what it's worth I just tried with 500 users and it worked with no issues. My guess is that the issue is that your expression that generates the list of users is failing in some way - maybe you're getting back some information from the database that doesn't contain a user? If you save the list of users you plan to use into a process variable before you get to the node, what data do you see for that variable when you monitor the process?
Peter, I have a question a bit unrelated to the OP though!
I am using MNI on a group of assignees and it is working fine. But when I add a new member to the group then the new member automatically does not get a copy of the task!!! Is this the expected behavior? (NOTE - I know the new member would receive the task if I didn't use MNI unless some other group member has already accepted the task).
That is expected as the task creation is initially done once on the original set of users.
Thank you!