Right, the Branch activity doesn’t actually do anything different than just having the paths go out to multiple activities from any other activity.

There isn’t any way for it to move on from the Join if there are still active paths leading up to it.

My moderately complex workflow that has a 3-way Branch, and some branches have If alternatives and conditional tasks, so that by the time the Join is reached there are 9 possible paths into the Join. Needless to say it always exits Incomplete. Not the behavior I expected, as every one of the 3 branching paths DID complete! But of course, both alternatives of every If NEVER complete.

Understanding this, I’ll send the Complete and Incomplete paths out of Joins to the same place from now on. However, that raises a question: If the Join gets 3 of the 9 inputs and correctly moves forward via the Incomplete path, is there a chance that it will sometimes incorrectly move forward with only 1 or 2 of the 9 inputs??

There are other options than a Join activity that may work better for you in the case you’ve quoted. If the client is manually adding tasks to a workflow, you can use a Wait for Condition activity to wait until all tasks are completed before moving onto the next step. If you go this route you’ll also need to accompany it with a business rule on the table against which the workflow is running. The Wiki has a useful example of how to configure both the Wait for Condition activity and the business rule:
http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Condition_Activities#Wait_for_condition
Go to section 4.4 of this article for all the details.

Yes, that’s exactly how it works. With the scenario of 1-5 paths, if there are 5 total potential paths and all 5 get executed then the Join would exit as Complete after they were all done. If 1-4 paths are executed then when all the activities that needed to run have completed the Join will exit as Incomplete.

In almost all cases you’re going to want to have both output lines going into the same activity afterwards. The only reason they would go to separate activities is if you wanted to differentiate between some or all of the potential paths of execution.

I’m not sure I quite follow what you’re getting at. I’ve had paths that went around Joins and the Join waits only for those activities that have transitions that lead into it.

Cheers Martin

This was a head scratcher for us a few months back, so I thought I would share so others are aware.