How do you get Appian to process an OR Gateway adhering to the BPMN 2.0 standard

greggl over 9 years ago

How do you get Appian to process an OR Gateway adhering to the BPMN 2.0 standard? In BPMN 2.0, utilized by Appian, an Inclusive OR Gateway specifies that one or more of the available paths will be taken. They could all be taken, or only one of them. And when a 2nd OR Gateway is used to merge the paths, the OR gateway explicitly requires that all paths that were activated must be completed prior to continuing in the process.The behavior allows for implementing process flows where 0 to many paths may be taken and then whichever ones were taken for each process instance, they must all be completed before the process continues.

Appian adheres to the BPMN 2.0 standard for the OR Gateway split, but for the OR Gateway merge, it is not adhering to the standard and waiting for the all the instances to complete. My testing and Appian Docs at link below confirm this by stating "When multiple flows enter an OR node, the Gateway node pauses after the first in...

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0 greggl over 9 years ago

Thanks for replying but I don't think if of those options will work. An AND Gateway waits for all incoming paths to continue, as you noted, but in this case not all the paths will be taken in the OR Gateway split so it will be stuck waiting for paths that will never arrive. And the Appian Doc on Complex Gateway states "When multiple flows enter a complex gateway, it allows only the first flow through, despite allowing you to configure it to wait for a configurable number of instance tokens to arrive before activating. Then, the gateway waits until all other incoming flows arrive before activating the outgoing flow again." I have no idea why it would let the first one through "despite allowing you to configure it to wait". This is also not standard BPMN 2.0 implementation, and I can't configure it anyway to wait for N# of paths or specific paths as I don't know for each process instance which paths occurred. That is the exact purpose of an OR Gateway in BPMN 2.0. When the # of paths is determined at run-time, the OR Gateway is specifically designed to wait until whichever paths occurred to complete before continuing. I'm not sure why Appian chose to not adhere to the BPMN 2.0 standard in this one area, but I am hoping someone knows how to achieve a standard OR Gateway split and merge in Appian.
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0 greggl over 9 years ago

Thanks for replying but I don't think if of those options will work. An AND Gateway waits for all incoming paths to continue, as you noted, but in this case not all the paths will be taken in the OR Gateway split so it will be stuck waiting for paths that will never arrive. And the Appian Doc on Complex Gateway states "When multiple flows enter a complex gateway, it allows only the first flow through, despite allowing you to configure it to wait for a configurable number of instance tokens to arrive before activating. Then, the gateway waits until all other incoming flows arrive before activating the outgoing flow again." I have no idea why it would let the first one through "despite allowing you to configure it to wait". This is also not standard BPMN 2.0 implementation, and I can't configure it anyway to wait for N# of paths or specific paths as I don't know for each process instance which paths occurred. That is the exact purpose of an OR Gateway in BPMN 2.0. When the # of paths is determined at run-time, the OR Gateway is specifically designed to wait until whichever paths occurred to complete before continuing. I'm not sure why Appian chose to not adhere to the BPMN 2.0 standard in this one area, but I am hoping someone knows how to achieve a standard OR Gateway split and merge in Appian.
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