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parallel branch approval workflow conditions were firing properly and now suddenly they are not

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Posted on by gmellis1 Microsoft Employee

I built an approval workflow that uses parallel branches, and each branch determines the first in-office approver for that tower and then assigns them an approval workflow and updates the approval dashboard with their name. It was working just fine for a week, and then suddenly today, it stopped working. Not reason. Nothing upstream of the workflow has changed at all. You can even see with the screenshot, that the trigger condition at the root is true. But for some unknown reason, the two branches (middle and right) that are in scope for the approval cancel every single time. Again.....it was working fine until Friday. I turned it back on to continue user acceptance testing and now it doesnt. I have tried every isolation technique i can (the below is a copy of the original workflow where i stripped off everything after the section where i am blocked.)

I was in the middle of testing with some VIPs, and now i cam totally blocked. So any ideas on how i can troubleshoot this and get to the bottom of it would be appreciated.

Brnaches not firing.JPG

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Pstork1 68,707 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Two quick questions.
Since the condition in your image evauluates to true is it supposed to go down the No side of the branch?
The first thing in your no side of the branch is a terminate statement. Is that there because you were trying to isolate that section of the Flow? If so, what is it set to? Successful, Failed, or Cancel?

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gmellis1 Microsoft Employee on at

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Actually, to try to troubleshoot, i converted the original condition of
Value - is equal to- 'In Review'
to
equals(variables('varOverallStatus'), 'In Review') is True, to see if that might be the issues.

As you can see in the screenshot, the argument is rendering True for the middle and right, because the workflow did not Terminate.

The left tower is expected to be false in this scenario, and you can see the Output of False correctly results in that path Terminating.

The logic is sound. Like i said, it was all working end to end properly until this morning.

Something changed that was not by my hand. But because clicking the Do Until section to try to get more information only displays:

Cancelled. in the output field, and no errors are generating, i have no idea how to isolate what is going on here.

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gmellis1 Microsoft Employee on at

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More bizarre information.

I saved a copy of the workflow, and stripped out two of the three parallel branches, and reran as test. And it worked.

Something with the branching has suddenly cause the workflow to start failing.

I then did it for the third tower (stripping our towers #1 and #2),and that one worked as well. Something has corrupted the triggering of the parallel branches not related to my workflow logic.

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gmellis1 Microsoft Employee on at

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I've isolated the issue. I am misusing the Termination task due to a misunderstanding in what it does. I was under the assumption it would terminate a branch. But when the left tower proceeds through faster than the others (because that branch doesnt meet the conditions to activate the other tasks, it Terminates. Which, having clarified my understanding of what Terminate does, terminates the entire workflow, not just the branch. My bad. I tested it last night, and the premature cancellations ended. Live and learn. I've seen some others on forums discover the same issue. I think the Terminate task should have some extraordinary emphasis on the expansive scope of Terminate, as I didnt pick up on this when i was reading about it.

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v-bacao-msft on at

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Hi @gmellis1 ,

Thanks so much for posting in the Flow Community! It appears that you have found a solution to your issue!

If so, please click "Accept as Solution" on the reply that describes how you were able to solve your issue!

This makes your post much easier for other members of the community to see and find when looking for a solution!

Best Regards,

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