Understanding Waits and Timeouts in Dynamics CRM Workflows

When to Wait, When to Timeout?

In particular, the “Wait” and “Timeout” conditions are both important ways of pausing a work process, and they seem similar, at least at first. As it turns out, they serve quite different functions, and I’ll try to clarify them here with a brief explanation and a couple examples:

Use Wait when you want a work process to pause until a condition changes. Some common examples of the kinds of conditions you might Wait for include:

• Wait until an assigned task is completed
• Wait until the status or status reason of a record changes
• Wait until the value of an attribute in a related entity changes

Use Timeout when you want a work process to pause until a specified date, for a specified period of time, or until you reach a date relative to the value of a CRM record’s date field. Some examples of these include:

• Timeout until an Opportunity record is “overdue” (the current date is greater than the opportunity’s estimated close date)
• Timeout until September 1, 2009 (maybe there’s a conference coming up on September 8 and you want to send a one-week reminder email to attendees)
• Timeout until one week has passed since a new Account record was created

In Dynamics CRM-speak, we can say that a Wait condition will be met when the attribute value of some entity changes. On the other hand, a Timeout condition will be met when time passes: either clock time or time relative to the value of a date attribute of some entity. My little mnemonic to help me remember is that of the two conditions, only Timeout contains the word “time”. Clever, eh?

Using a Wait in a Workflow

Here’s an example of a Wait condition: a simple sales process might have stages, and one or more stages might assign tasks. There’s nothing about creating and assigning a task record in Dynamics CRM that makes a workflow pause, so if you want to make sure the task gets completed before going on, you can add a condition, to the effect “Wait until activity status=completed”. The following screenshot shows a simple sales process implemented as a workflow on the Opportunity entity. It starts automatically, when a new opportunity is created, and has these characteristic Wait until conditions in each of the first two stages of the sales process:

Using a Timeout in a Workflow

I understood Waits before I understood Timeouts – probably because the latter are a little harder to find! One of my favorite examples of using a Timeout in a workflow is another aspect of a sales process: making sure that opportunities don’t go past their estimated close date (or at least, if they do, make sure you take appropriate action!). Here’s a simple implementation of that logic, in an automatic opportunity workflow that starts by timing out until one day before the “Est. Close Date” of the opportunity and sends a reminder email. Next, it times out until seven days after the opportunity was supposed to close…and closes it out if it is. (Implementing a process like this might be a culture shock for some sales organizations, so you might want to warn them in the reminder email that this will happen.)

If you clicked on the second of these two Timeout conditions, here’s what the condition looks like:

Like I said, this is pretty well hid! In order to add the Timeout condition, you first have to select Wait Condition from the Add Step menu, and only when you open the Specify Workflow Condition dialog do you actually configure the Timeout! Within the Specify Workflow Condition dialog you do this by selecting the somewhat cryptic “Workflow” value from the first column’s drop-down menu, and then selecting Timeout in the second column, as the previous screenshot illustrates. After selecting Timeout, you’ll see that “Equals” is your only option in the third column, and then you use the Form Assistant to configure the Timeout. In the example I show here I followed these steps to configure the condition:

1. selected “7″ in the Days field
2. selected “After” in the next field
3. selected the Opportunity entity in the Look for pull-down
4. selected “Est. Close Date” as the field to make the Timeout condition evaluate

This takes a little getting used to, but after you do it a few times you get the hang of it.

(In my opinion, this would be easier to understand if you could select either Wait Condition or Timeout Condition from the Add Step menu directly, but then I didn’t design the CRM 4.0 workflow design UI.)

If you found this helpful, my book on Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0 has detailed explanations of topics like this one plus lots of others, and downloadable versions of the example workflows. Here’s a link to the page on Lulu.com where you can find out more and buy the book. 

Cheers – Richard Knudson, richardk@imginc.com