What happens to recurring workflows once the async

Question

Our org is planning on basing parts of our business model on the premise of recurring workflows in CRM 2011. However, we sometimes run into an issue with a backed up workflow queue, or for some reason need to restart the server (update rollups, etc.), or in some other way find we have to restart the CRM's async service.

What would happen to any workflows in the "waiting" phase in this scenario?

• I see the workflow in the AsyncOperationBase table with the "waiting" statuscode; when the service comes back online, does it look at this table and resume accordingly?
• In the above scenario, what what would happen if the service was stopped, and in the interim, the workflow reached its PostponeUntil date? Does the service look at all non-complete future and backdated workflows and decide what to with each? Or does the workflow just fail altogether?

Any fails in the process would obviously be a deal breaker for this element of the CRM system, and we'd have to develop an external component to handle recurring items.

I'd expect there to be some documentation on this, but I can only guess that the WaitSubscription class has something to do with this topic, but it's for the most part undocumented.

Answer 1

For now, we've decided to go with an external service to manage this, due to the seemingly black box nature of the async process. Tracing the calls to the database server does show a lot of calls to the AsyncOperationBase table, which tends to make me believe the service always checks to see if a job is being done, but in the absence of extreme testing, for now it's more secure to use a separate service for this requirement.