Duplicate entries to appended comments from workflow

Question

There is a question that has been posted that had the same issue but the resolution did not work entirely for me.

Multi-Line Text - Append Changes - Duplicate Entries on Save

In my situation I am using a comments field that I want appended. I have all the settings for that set up correctly. I have a workflow that checks different statuses of my document and will send out emails to users based on certain status, etc.

At first, the comments field would be saving 11 - 14 times per save. I then updated my workflow to have the very first stage update the field with a blank string. That is the information that I have seen to fix the duplication problem for other users. By doing that I reduced the duplication to 1 extra copy.

How do I get rid of this last duplicate? The very first thing my workflow is doing is clearing out the field. I have also verified that the duplication is happening sometime before my first action in my first stage of the workflow by putting in a 2 minute wait at the very beginning. So sometime between when I save the item and it actually starts running the steps of my workflow it is adding this duplicate.

Answer 1

Figured out what was causing this. The setting Automatically update the workflow status to the current stage name is automatically set to yes for workflows in Designer. By unchecking this is stopped the duplication of my comments.

The reasoning for this is it is updating my list item with my first stage name before it is actually running any actions in my first stage. Because of that, I was unable to clear the field until a duplicate was created.