Why is workflow triggered on out of date data?

Lee Joramo

I have a Workflow running despite condition not being met. This is a NEW behavior in a workflow that has been running unmodified for at least 9 months. (Maybe even years) I have seen this occur several times in the last few weeks.

Trigger: run every Tuesday and Friday at 3:00 AM

Condition: "Status" column is one of: "Report Due" (with only one value selected)

Action: Alert someone.

In the case of this problem, Monday morning the value of Status started the day at "Report Due" and passed through several other values and ended the day with a value of "Complete" which was set at 2:13 PM.

Tuesday morning at 3 am, the workflow runs and passes though the condition that should now block it because the "Status" is no longer equal to "Report Due".

The alert email contains the values of all of the Cells in the row, and it shows that the value is still set to "Report Due" but this is in direct conflict with the values and timestamps shown in the "Cell History"

Here is the workflow:

Here is the Cell history of the "Status" column of the Row clearly showing the value was no longer set to "Report Due":

Here is the headers of the Email sent by the alert. Notice the sent time is the early the next morning. Over 12 hours AFTER the Status had been changed to a value the should not pass the condition:

from the same email it INCORRECTLY reports the current value of the Status as still "Report Due":

This clearly looks like a problem with Smartsheets workflows running with old data.

Over many years, I have seen rare occasions when workflows were delayed in running. In these cases, I would typically find an Incident reported on the Smartsheet status board. But I never had a case when it was running on old data.

Anyone see a problem with my analysis of the above? Or have you experienced similar issues with workflows running on out of date data?

kowal

hi @Lee Joramo,

I went through your analysis and I agree that the workflow shall not be triggered as on 10th of may the status was changed from Report Due to sth else… that shall stop it from execution.

if I were you I would make a copy of this sheet / change the email addresses of recipients and make some tests if this occurs it means that there is a bug that smartsheet needs to fix immediately.

that's the only advice that comes to my head.