Building Workflows with Nested Wait/Timeouts in CRM 4.0

I recently worked with a customer using CRM online.  Part of their process was to create authorizations, which needed to be reviewed quarterly relative to the authorization’s start date. They wanted a reminder email sent 1 month prior to that quarterly review.

I created a workflow with these conditions; however, every time I ran the workflow it would only honor the first timeout condition.  The other 2 timeout conditions received check marks, but they were ignored otherwise.

Here is a short example of the situation:

As you can see, this workflow was initiated at 8:47pm with a 4 minute timeout. The time in the lower right shows 8:50pm, so it is correcting in a “waiting” state.

Next, you’ll see that it is now 8:53pm and the workflow should be in its 2nd timeout phase until 8:55pm.  Instead, it has processed all the way through the workflow.

The workflow will not honor nested timeouts in this format.  There are 2 solutions you use to get the workflow to work.

Solution 1 – Use child workflows

In the example above, you will create a child workflow within the “parent” workflow that starts with a timeout condition and then performs an update.  See below.

Parent workflow

Child workflow

Also, from a design standpoint, it is better to use child workflows when creating workflows that span many days.  This way if you need to ever stop your main workflow, there is much less disruption because child workflows currently working items are not impacted.

 

Solution 2 – Insert a “no op” step and base the nested timeout on that date/time

The goal here is to insert a step prior to the nested (2nd) timeout which will act as a point of reference against which the nested timeout can fire.  A “no op” step is a step, such as an update step, that is in the workflow, but you don’t set it to update anything.  Even though it doesn’t update anything, the system thinks it did and so the ‘Modified On’ date is changed.  Now you can set your timeout step to timeout x hours, days, etc. from the ‘Modified On’ date & time.  Below is an example of how to configure it.