Workflows triggering each other

Question

There are 2 workflows(2010) WF1 and WF2 both set to trigger when item created/modified. And both the workflows does the same thing which is update a column. WF1 will set the column value to 1 and WF2 will set the column value to 2.

My assumption is that when I create a new item, both the WFs will get triggered and trigger each other continually. On the contrary, they both stopped after 5 instances of each workflows. When I added a 1 min pause at the end of both the workflows, they dont trigger each other. They run only once.

My question is why did the workflow stop after 5 instances each when there is no pause, and why they dont trigger each other when added a pause.

can someone please explain?

Answer 1

May this help you in understanding your problem. It helped me in the past when I was working on the same requirement.

"Consider a scenario where you have a SharePoint 2013 workflow that creates an item on another list. On this other list you have another SharePoint 2013 workflow that’s set to auto-start on item creation. When the first workflow is triggered, it adds the item to the other list and completes successfully. But you’ll notice that the workflow associated with the other list does not get triggered at all."

This is cause because of an intentional change that was introduced in SharePoint 2013 product somewhere between April/June 2013 CU/updates. The workflow recursion prevention measure was put in place to mitigate the following scenario:

• We have two workflows and both activate on item updates in the same list.
• The workflow also updates list item in the list causing an infinite loop of workflow activations.
• Fixing that unfortunately resulted in the above scenario not work which is a genuine and quite commonly used approach.

Read more about this here

Answer 2

I found this response from a few years ago:

I ended up creating a hidden field, called NewItem, which by default was set to yes. In the Change Notification workflow, if the field equaled "Yes", I changed the field to "No", and ended the workflow. Else if, the field equaled "No", then the Change e-mail would be sent out. I'm not sure why this worked, and my logic involving the Diff column did not work. I'd have to guess that the Change Notification workflow was being kicked off before the Diff column was being re-calculated?

From this Stack Exchange post.