topic Re: Working around the 90 minute limit in Workato Pros Discussion Board

Working around the 90 minute limit

jessica-lie — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:17:23 GMT

[Dec 3, 2020] Mike Power (CRM Enterprise Architect at American University) posted:

Good afternoon all,

I have a parent recipe that retrieves records from an outside source, then loops through each transaction and calls a child recipe to process that individual transaction. When all are done, it marks a flag that all transactions are complete.

Currently I make the calls to the child recipe synchronously so that when I get to the last steps in the parent recipe, I know they’re all done. Recently I started hitting that 90 minute timeout in Workato.

So I’m considering how to re-do things.

My initial thoughts are to call the child recipe asynchronously (though it seems to only allow it up to 5 times in parallel, where I may have a couple thousand transactions to get through), then at the end of the parent recipe update either a Lookup table or maybe there’s something in the pub/sub I can utilize (though I haven’t read up on that yet). Then maybe each child recipe, when they finish, they update either the Lookup or pub/sub so that a recipe gets triggered to compare the count completed with the total count (recorded by the parent recipe when it finished), and only when they equal does a triggered recipe update the flag.

Clearly this is half-baked and I’m just starting to think it through. I’d welcome any thoughts from anyone who has already cracked this nut before.

Re: Working around the 90 minute limit

jessica-lie — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:18:29 GMT

[Dec 4, 2020] Deven Maru (CSM at Workato) replied:

Mike,

Take a look at the wait featurehttps://docs.workato.com/features/callable-recipes/wait-for-async-action.html. This way you'll avoid manual callable recipe completion synchronization.

Re: Working around the 90 minute limit

jessica-lie — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:18:55 GMT

[Dec 4, 2020] Mike Power (CRM Enterprise Architect at American University) replied:

Thanks Deven. I did consider that but if I can only execute 5 of my child workflows at a time (I’m assuming the “Concurrency” setting applies regardless of sync/async), I still worry about the parent recipe waiting for all of the child recipes to finish within the 90 minute allotment. I had hoped to get away from the 90 minute limit completely. Do you think there’s another way to go about that?

Re: Working around the 90 minute limit

jessica-lie — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:19:42 GMT

[Dec 10, 2020] Deven Maru (CSM at Workato) replied:

Posting rest of the conversation here after the above message was posted by Mike.

[DEVEN] Mike, there's a timeout limit input field in the Wait action of Callable recipe. You can set it to more than90mins and try it out. I'm including Gabriel who can provide more information.

[MIKE] Thanks Deven. Doesn’t that timeout limit mean that the parent recipe which is awaiting the child recipe will wait longer than 90 minutes, but the parent recipe itself will still get timed out after 90 minutes?

[DEVEN] No, the parent recipe will "sleep" at the Wait step waiting for your callable recipes to complete. The parent recipe timeout clock "sleeps" as well. When the wait is over, the timeout clock resumes. So, to answer your question, the parent recipe should not get timed out.

Re: Working around the 90 minute limit

jessica-lie — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:20:50 GMT

[Dec 11, 2020] Mike Power (CRM Enterprise Architect at American University) replied:

Thanks. I’ve set the child recipe to be asynchronously called (concurrency = 5) and then I calculate a wait time based on the number of transactions.

Worked ok in Test so I’ll move it to Prod soon, and hopefully all will be well!

Re: Working around the 90 minute limit

jessica-lie — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:24:53 GMT

[Dec 11, 2020] Deepak Mohan from Box replied:

Instead of calculating the time taken, use "is last” option and add a condition when its met to take further action may be in another recipe.

Re: Working around the 90 minute limit

jessica-lie — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:30:54 GMT

[Dec 4, 2020] Gordon Hu from WeGalvanize replied:

Hi Mike,

It looks like you are using synchronous recipe to monitor success/failure. I’ve done it the same way but not in a big for-loop so haven’t encountered the 90-min time out yet.

I have an idea:

if a child recipe fails, can it “self-heals” by using Monitor/Error + Retry? If so, we may let it retry itself a couple times.
Then, if the retry still fails – write the necessary information somewhere

Use another recipe to monitor this somewhere to alert you/or run in a different time/schedule. Ideally, we want this somewhere to be empty.

Pros:

We turn child from synchronous into asynchronous
Master recipe / Child recipe are likely to run within the 90-mins limit.

Having said that, we may run into API limit – given the number of iterations. I have sometimes “slowed down” my iteration by using this trick

If iteration index is % x = 0, slow down for y second. This means I don’t have to slow down for each iteration but only on some iterations.

And I haven’t read pub/sub yet…..gotta do it!

Re: Working around the 90 minute limit

jessica-lie — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:31:32 GMT

[Dec 4, 2020] Mike Power (CRM Enterprise Architect at American University) replied:

Thanks for the response Gordon. I actually don’t need to worry about the child recipes at all b/c they are doing just that, they are logging out their status within their own execution, and if anything goes wrong with them they are creating a Task in Dynamics CRM to draw our attention.

So the parent recipe really doesn’t need anything from them.

The key is simply waiting until they’re all finished before updating the flag that they’re all done. That’s the part I’m still not sure the best way to accomplish that avoids the 90 minute limit.

Re: Working around the 90 minute limit

jessica-lie — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 12:32:24 GMT

[Dec 4, 2020] Gordon Hu from WeGalvanize replied:

Mike,

I have a not-so-smart but quick workaround 😊 .

Create two Box files (doesn’t have to be box, just need somewhere to store the value)

file_1: reference file – store the size of the for loop list
file_2: iteration update – default vaule = 0

Parent Recipe:

Save the list size in file_1
Create a for loop with the list size

Call child recipe

Chile Recipe:

Update file_2 = previous value + 1
Do the job
Compare file_1 and file_2’s value:

If file_2 < file_1: ignore
If file_2 = file_1: this indicate the whole loop is done, notify you, and reset both file_1, file_2