Start Process Smart Service Asynchronosity

Hi all,

 

According to the documentation as specified in this link, the Start Process Smart Service does not follow activity chaining and the process flow continues as soon as the process is started.

However, given a process that looks like this:

The process flow does not continue immediately and waits for the started process to end.

The started process contains a web API call to an external system (which takes some time) and all nodes inside the started process are activity-chained.

When the activity chaining in the started process is removed, the expected behavior (according to the link provided) kicks in and the process flow continues immediately.

 

We are using Appian 18.2.

 

Is this really the behavior of Start Process Smart Service?

 

Thanks!

  Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible

  • Hi jraquino,

    The behavior of the node depends on the permissions of the user running the smart service. The following table details the result of running the smart service given different permission levels.

    Initiator: The process is started, but only the process instance ID (processInfo.pp.id) is populated in the process info variable. All other process info values will be null.

    Thanks,
    ravalik
  • Hi jraquino,

    The smart service is behaving as expected. After activity-chaining gets completed, then, the process flow in the main process model continues.

    Please find below the exact line taken from the documentation,
    The new process is started asynchronously, and the process flow of the current process continues immediately after all activity-chaining completes.

    Thanks,
    Hema
  • Hi @Hema,

    I just viewed the actual documentation of the Start Process Smart Service and saw the line you were talking about.

     

    However, it looks like there's an inconsistency in Appian's documentation which caused the confusion.

    From this article Ways to Start a Process:

    Also from the same documentation above, it mentions that the activity-chaining is not followed for the Start Process Smart Service.

    While from this article Start Process Smart Service:

    Hope they clear up the documentation.

    Thanks!