Workflows: Another Good ‘un by Richard Knudson
Recursive Workflows in Dynamics CRM from Richard Knudson’s Dynamics CRM Trick Bag
Dynamics CRM workflows can wait, but they can’t loop. Here’s how I think about Wait conditions:
- A workflow can wait for something to happen. For example, a business process might wait until a record’s status changes, or until it gets reassigned. In cases like these, a workflow with a Wait condition will just sit there … waiting (its System Job’s status reason value will be equal to “Waiting”, in case you want to do an Advanced Find to verify)…until the status changes or the record gets reassigned.
- A workflow can also wait for time to pass. There’s a special “Timeout” function you can access through Local Values in the Specify Workflow Conditions dialog you can use for these kinds of wait conditions. This is useful for processes that wait for a certain time after a record is created. For example, a lead might need to be followed up on, or a service level agreement might require a case to be resolved within a certain period of time.
But what if you had a staged sales process and in certain scenarios you need to go back to a previous stage in the process? Or what if a lead record needs to be reassigned to successive people or queues if it’s neglected for too long? Or what if a case needs to be escalated if it’s not resolved according to a service level agreement?