Assign an instance within a screenflow

Question

Hi,
I would like to assign an instance to the first participant, who "opens" a task, meaning who opens the screenflow of the current activity. And he or she should be still assigned even the screen might be cancelled. So usually, I know, you can assign using Participant.next, but is that working also within a screenflow? And I guess it will not work in case of a cancel, because if someone cancels the screen it would rollback all changes, right? Is there any other solution?
Regards
Matthias

Answer 1

Sure you've tried about everything and know you're not going to like this answer.
You'd think you could assign the participant.next in the Interactive activity's outgoing argument mappings but this will not work (sorry to remind you of a frustrating 10 minutes you recently had).
The only way you can assign the instance to the participant who opened the screenflow is to have it leave the Interactive activity and then flow to an Automatic activity (where participant.next is set) and then flow back into the Interactive activity.
Here are the steps to do this in case you need them:
1. Create a new String instance variable in your screenflow called "personInSF".
2. Inside an automatic task immediately after the Begin in the Screenflow, set this variable to "Participant.name".
3. Map this instance variable to an outgoing argument variable that exits the screenflow. Make sure that the Interactive activity has a variable mapped to this outgoing argument variable containing the participant's name (you'll need it in step 7 below).
4. Capture the fact that the user hit the "Cancel" button. Do not set the action predefined variable to CANCEL like you normally would. Just set some instance variable (call it "cancelFlag") inside the screenflow that goes out of the screenflow to "cancel" to flag that the button was clicked. Make sure that this variable is set to some value other than null as it leaves the Screenflow (e.g. either "cancel" or "ok").
5. (this is the part you're not going to like) In the process (not the screenflow), add an Automatic activity. Have your interactive activity flow to this Automatic activity using a conditional transition. The logic needs to detect if the cancel button was clicked so add this logic to your conditional transition "cancelFlag = "cancel".
6. Have this Automatic activity flow back to the Interactive activity.
7. In the logic in the Automatic activity, set "participant.next" to the name of the participant you passed out of the Interactive activity in step 3. Know you know this, but use logic like this:
{code}participant.next = participant.find(name : personInSf){code}
Dan