I have a process that starts on a timer. But it doesn't always start. It&#

RE: I have a process that starts on a timer. But it doesn't always start. It&#

Eduardo Fuentes — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 08:26:12 GMT

Thank you for clarifying. Appian Technical Support will follow-up with you via support case on this new behavior you saw.

RE: I have a process that starts on a timer. But it doesn't always start. It&#

lesliem — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 23:03:51 GMT

Eduardo, this is what we discovered. As you mentioned in your note if you change the constant that a timer uses in a process you must republish the process to use the new time. But, what we also found is that once you save the constant, whether you change the constant or not it breaks the timer on the process and the process will not start via the start timer until you republish the process.

RE: I have a process that starts on a timer. But it doesn't always start. It&#

Eduardo Fuentes — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 06:56:19 GMT

Since I am not familiar with your model I won't be able to explain why it didn't run at all but based on what you describe I suggest you republish the model and monitor if it starts at the new time the constant has.

RE: I have a process that starts on a timer. But it doesn't always start. It&#

lesliem — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 06:54:12 GMT

If that's the case, why didn't the process start at 7:30 am, the original time the constant was set at? Instead it didn't start at all.

RE: I have a process that starts on a timer. But it doesn't always start. It&#

Eduardo Fuentes — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 06:52:17 GMT

If the timer is in a Start Event you will need to republish the model every time you change the constant.

You need this because when you configure the timer the model creates an image with the values at design time (7:30AM in this case) to record what values it will use to launch process instances. When you update the constant at runtime the model already has an image of the original values because you configured the timer at design time, that's why republishing is necessary. This is by design but can be easily worked around by the approach described above if the update of the constant is frequent.

forum.appian.com/.../e-109312

RE: I have a process that starts on a timer. But it doesn't always start. It&#

lesliem — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 06:47:03 GMT

The timer hasn't worked in the development environment since around the beginning of March, I didn't think it was a big deal because it was only the development environment, but it continued to work in the production environment until today. I saw a post you commented on that if the constant is changed for a start time the process would need to be republished. I attempted that today in the development environment multiple times and have still not gotten the process to start on the timer in the development environment. Is there something in our configuration that could have changed that stopped the timer from working?

RE: I have a process that starts on a timer. But it doesn't always start. It&#

lesliem — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 06:44:10 GMT

Eduardo, the timer is a start timer which starts at the time a constant is set. So the constant was set to start at 1:00 pm today, but never started. I deployed the application to production on Thursday evening. The constant was set to start at 7:30 am which it did on Friday. (This is not the time the team wanted it to start, but we let it run). I changed the constant in Production to 1:00 pm on Friday around 9:00 am. The process does not run over the weekend, but should have started today at 1:00 pm, but it did not. So it did work in the past but did not today.

RE: I have a process that starts on a timer. But it doesn't always start. It&#

Eduardo Fuentes — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 06:34:07 GMT

Maybe there's an issue with the expression used to determine whether it should be trigger or not. I suggest you run additional tests in the rules interface to confirm the expression correctly works for different test cases.