Activity Failed Tasks

If there are errors in Activities, while executing the workflow, an Activity Failed Task is generated. The Activity Failed Task signalizes that there has been an error while executing the workflow. The workflow itself interrupts the execution. These errors can be of any type such as parse error, or the given path does not exist, etc. 

As you created the workflow, you are the process owner and therefore you get the notification of a new task and then the Activity Failed Task, does not matter if you were the one who started the process or not. For that reason, it is your turn to decide what happens to the interrupted execution of the workflow.

There are 3 possibilities to choose from: 

  • Click Continue for the opportunity to enter missing or false information into the sheet.
  • Click Stop Process to stop the execution of the workflow.
  • Click Retry to let the workflow attempt the activity again.

Substitution  Plan

But what if, the process owner is not available and the process is not working so it requires troubleshooting? No one except for the process owner gets the Activity Failed Tasks, so how can the process be fixed? The answer to the question is a Substitution Plan.

The Substitution Plan provides the functionality to enter a user as a substitution for a specific span of time, which means within that span the assigned user gets all the tasks assigned to the substituted user and therefore the Activity Failed Tasks as well. 


Please note, that the process owner can still see the tasks assigned to the substitution user during the substitution plan. The process owner can see all tasks of his processes in the Supervisor tab from the Tasks Designer, does not matter to whom the task is assigned.

Create a Substitution Plan

Navigate to the Preferences by clicking Menu -> Preferences at the left top corner. In the section Substitution Plans click Add substitution rule.

In the opened dialog the substituted user and the user who substitutes have to be selected. Besides the date of substitution, the reason for substitution can be selected and whether the finished tasks should be redeployed to the substitution user as soon as the rule is applied or not. 

Click OK to save the rule and from the entered Start date on, Isabel Lahiri (substitution user) receives all the tasks from Rusty Ryan (substituted user - process owner) until the entered End date.

Log File

If errors occur, sometimes it is very helpful to know where exactly these errors came from, and most of the time, it is not quite clear. Therefore it can be useful to know where the log files are to search the errors there. To get to those Log Files you have to switch to the server, where the FireStart Server is installed. There you open the Explorer and navigate to C:\Resources\Logs. In this folder, you have lots of Log Files to search an error.

Backup and Recovery

There is only one thing which is essential to back up for a possible recovery of FireStart, and this is the database. A backup of the registry might also be helpful, but if there exists no backup the configuration simply needs to be redone, which is not that bad, as it only costs a bit more time. The setup itself does not need to be backed up but can, of course, be backed up. If there exists no backup of the setup then it can easily be downloaded again.

For the recovery, there is a specific order what to recover first. The order is important, because if the configuration is already done the setup knows that it is not the first installation, and therefore adapts the existing configuration. The first thing is the configuration of the Prologics Configuration Wizard, which contains data from the backed up registry. If you have no backup of the registry, then check out the Installation topic for further information to set up the Configuration Wizard. Next is the recovery of the database and last but not least the setup itself. 

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