I have a workflow that get’s filtered via a series of Custom events. The reason I did this was to neaten up my workflow (and help troubleshoot) so as not to repeat the same steps depending on where I am in my app.
If I follow my workflow, step by step, checking the DB at every checkpoint, I notice that at one point, it just goes ahead and creates the thing before the actual step where it’s supposed to create it. It actually even creates it with all the correct attributes, but how does it know?
I thought it could be an autobinding thing, but autobinding is turned off. This would solve the whole concept of “create if thing doesn’t exist”, which it seems to be doing.
Does anyone know how something could be created before the workflow step “Create a thing” has been executed?
Here’s the beauty: If I go ahead and remove my actual step that is supposed to “create the thing”, then all of a sudden this magical behaviour doesn’t happen? I even tried “Make changes to the thing” since it clearly has already been created without my control - again seems to not be there.
So it’s almost like the workflow is predicting the outcome or jumping ahead of itself and not following along with the step-by-step debugger.
If the “Create a thing” step doesn’t rely on anything other step’s result, then it will just execute as soon as it can for speed purposes.
The whole “Step 1” “Step 2” “Step 3” thing is pretty misleading cause its not necessarily in steps, where each one waiting on the completion of the step before it.
I even went through the logs and when I clicked on the link that created that step, it takes me to my actual step where I wanted it created, but at the time of debugging I had never actually gotten there as yet.
So would you recommend I make a deliberate depency where it cannot be created until it has something from the previous step that I want it to be using data from?
If you need a step to use some other information from a previous step, definitely use references like “Result of step 1”
But don’t slow down your workflow for no reason if your Create a thing step doesn’t actually have to wait on anything.
Like don’t Create a Thing in step 1, then in step 2 search for it and expect to find it because it won’t be waiting on step 1 and you will have problems.
