Workflow best practices

With Adobe Campaign, you can set up all types of workflow to perform a large scope of tasks. However, when designing and executing your workflows, you need to be very cautious as a bad implementation can lead to bad performances, errors,and platform issues. You can find below a list of best practices and troubleshooting tips.

Naming

To ease workflow troubleshooting, Adobe recommends to name and label your workflows explicitly. Fill in the workflow’s description field to summarize the process to be performed so that the operator can easily understand it.
If the workflow is part of a process involving multiple workflows, you can use numbers when entering a label to order them clearly.

For example:

• 001 – Import - Import recipients
• 002 – Import – Import sales
• 003 – Import – Import sales details
• 010 – Export – Export delivery logs
• 011 – Export – Export tracking logs

Duplicating workflows

You can duplicate workflows. In the Marketing Activities, hover over the workflow and click Duplicate element. Once duplicated, modifications of the workflow are not carried over to the copy of the workflow. The copy of the workflow can be edited.

Execution

Number of workflows

By default, we recommend not to run more than 20 active workflows executions simultaneously (this does not apply to workflows waiting for a scheduled execution). After hitting that limit, workflows will be queued in order not to affect performances.

In specific contexts, you may need to run more than 20 workflows. If so, you need to check the use cases with a Campaign expert and contact Adobe Customer Care to increase the limit.

Before starting a workflow, Campaign Standard will check if there is enough system physical memory to run the workflow. If there is not enough available memory, a message will inform you that the workflow execution will be delayed until the load on the server comes down and the system memory increases.

Frequency

A workflow cannot be automatically executed more often than once every ten minutes.
The Repetition frequency of the activity cannot be less than 10 minutes. If the repetition frequency is set at 0 (also the default value), this option is not taken into account and the workflow will run according to the execution frequency.

Paused workflows

Workflows that have been in pause or fail status for more than 7 days are stopped in order to consume less disk space. The cleaning task is displayed in the workflow logs.

Transitions

A workflow containing unterminated transitions can still be executed: it will generate a warning message and the workflow will pause once it reaches the transition but will not generate an error. You can also start a workflow without a finished design and complete it as you go along.

For more information, refer to Executing workflows.

Time zone

The workflow properties allow you to define a specific time zone that will be used by default in all the its activities. By default, the workflow’s time zone is the one defined for the current Campaign operator.

Activity

Number of activities per workflow

We recommend using up to 100 activities into a single workflow. Over 100 activities, you may encounter some performance issues when designing and configuring your workflow.

Workflow design

To ensure that the workflow ends properly, avoid leaving the last transition of a workflow on its own by using an End activity.

To access the detail view of the transitions, check the Keep interim results option in the Execution section of the workflow properties.

Labelling activities

While developing your workflow, a name is generated for every activity, as for all Adobe Campaign objects. While the name of an activity is generated by the tool and cannot be edited, we recommend to label it with an explicit name when configuring it.

Duplicating activities

To duplicate existing activities, you can use copy-paste. This way, you keep the settings that were originally defined. For more information, refer to Duplicating workflow activities.

Scheduler activity

When building your workflow, only use one Scheduler activity per branch. If the same branch of a workflow has several schedulers (linked to each other), the number of tasks to be executed will be multiplied exponentially, which would considerably overload the database.

You can preview the next ten executions of your workflows by clicking Preview next executions.

For more information, refer to Scheduler activity.

When designing a scheduled workflow which includes multiple activities, you need to make sure that the workflow is not rescheduled until it is finished. To do this, you need to configure your workflow in order to prevent its execution if one or more tasks from a previously execution is still pending. For more on this, refer to this page.

Calling workflow with parameters

Make sure that the name and number of parameters are identical to what is defined when calling the workflow (see this page. The parameters’ types must also be consistent with the values that are expected.

Make sure that all the parameters have been declared in the External signal activity. Otherwise, an error will occur when running the activity.

For more information, see Calling a workflow with external parameters.

Exporting packages

To export packages, the resources exported must not contain default IDs. Therefore, the IDs of exportable resources must be changed by using a different name from the templates provided as standard by Adobe Campaign Standard.
For more information, see Managing packages.

Exporting lists

The export list option allows you to export a maximum of 100,000 lines by default and defined by the Nms_ExportListLimit option. This option can be managed by the functional administrator, under Administration > Application settings > Options.
For more information, see Exporting lists.

Troubleshooting

Adobe Campaign offers various logs to better understand your workflow issues.

Using workflow logs

You can access workflow logs to monitor the execution of your activities. It indexes the operations carried out and execution errors by chronological order. The Logs tab consists in the history of the execution of all or some selected activities.
The Tasks tab details the execution sequencing of the activities. To get more information on an activity, click a task.
For more information, refer to Monitoring workflow execution.

Troubleshooting data management activities

You can analyze SQL queries in the Log tab.

1. In the workflow workspace, click Edit properties.
2. In General > Execution, check the Save SQL queries in the log and Execute in the engine options and click Confirm.

To see SQL queries in Log:

1. Click Log and Tasks.
2. In the Logs tab, open the Search panel.
3. Check Display SQL logs only.

The query is displayed in the Message column of the logs.

Using delivery logs

Delivery logs allow to monitor the success of your deliveries. Exclusion logs return excluded messages during preparation of the sending. Sending logs provide the status of the delivery for each profile.
For more information, refer to Understanding delivery failures.

Using delivery alerting

The Delivery alerting feature is an alert management system that enables a group of users to automatically receive notifications containing information on the execution of their deliveries.
For more information, refer to Delivery alerting.

Related topics:

• Error Management