Insert more copy-of-instance into not-finished-still-working multi-join

Question

Hi,
any one can help me how to insert more copy-of-instance into not-finished-still-working multi-join circuit?
my customer told me a fuzzy question.

Answer 1

There is nothing out of the box that will let you create more copies inside a Multiple / Join once it has already created the original copies.
What you could do is to have an Automatic activity create a certain number of work item instances into another process (called "spawned" process in the rest of this thread). One of the argument variables passed into the spawned process instances would need to be a unique correlation id for the original process instance. From the Automatic activity in the original process, the instance could flow into a Message Wait activity where it would wait to be notified once the last of the spawned work item instances complete. A count of number of work item instances created in the spawned process would need to be stored into an external database table. Just before each of the work item instances reached their End activity in the spawned process, they would do two things:
1) any information gathered in the spawned process would need to be stored in the database and
2) the count in the database would be decremented.
If the count is zero (the last one in the spawned process to complete), it would send a notification to the Message Wait activity in the process that spawned the work items. The original process would then need to read the external database to read the information gathered by the spawned process instances.
If you do this, to add another "copy", you would just need to do two things:
1) create another work item instance in the spawned process and
2) increment the count in the external database by one
Hope this helps,
Dan