Hi, we have a new user base in Appian 7.9 and parts of the user base are not com

I will leave the thread open for other people to share their ideas but what I've seen is that the best practice is to configure Exception Flows (forum.appian.com/.../Exception_Flows.html) so that the task times out after a few minutes or hours and terminates the process to prevent having abandoned processes.

I agree with Eduardo.

If you really want to restrict users from creating more than one active instance per process model, you can use "Active Processes" report available under Reports-->>Process Reports-->. In you process model you have to use "Execute Process Report" smart service and get details by user and by process.
Using the same you can restrice users not to create instances if one active instance is already created.

@jarrods One alternative approach is to have a process start form which will help in preventing the launch of process instance until the user submits the form. Appian Forum is a classic example of this, afaik most of the Actions they have provided are configured as process start form which doesn't launch an instance until we put required information and confirm submitting the form. The only disadvantage of this approach is, 'Save Changes', 'Reassign', 'Reject' won't be available on the process start form.

And next to the above step, you can include an additional functionality on the start form which gets the link to active task that belongs to the current process model. In this way, even though if the user directly goes to task by clicking the link, there won't be any active instance generated because process start form doesn't allow us to start instance until we submit the form. Even though if the instance is generated in this case, you can simply end the process rather than having a timeout because the functionality of the task is offered in the process start form itself.

And with respect to querying, I would like to suggest to include the conditions carefully. For instance, if we just depend on the ‘Active’ processes, we may end up in launching more than one instance when the active instance’s status turns to Paused (might be because of ongoing support activity) or Paused by Exception.

Thanks guys- that's some really good advice, this could be workable.