Re: Workflow Actions are Parallel?
Re: Workflow Actions are Parallel?
- Subject: Re: Workflow Actions are Parallel?
- From: Ben Waldie <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:03:23 -0500
Automator itself shouldn't run two actions at once. It should run the
first one, and when it's done, then run the second.
That said, depending on how an individual action is written by its
developer, it could potentially release control back to the workflow
before its task has been completed. For example, an action could be
written to tell an application to do something, such as save a file
somewhere, and then not wait until the file is done saving before
telling Automator that it's done the task.
-Ben
On Jan 24, 2008, at 6:38 PM, Rush Manbert wrote:
I can't find mention of this in the docs, so I thought I'd ask here.
I have written a workflow that generates some files, then moves them
to a different folder. My first attempt kept getting a "no such file
or directory" error at the copy step.
I finally realized that I was seeing a race condition between the
action that creates the files and the action that moves them. The
move action had actually started before the file generation action
had completed. In fact, it had started before anything had been
written.
I added a 5 second Pause action before the move action. That got rid
of the error, but I was still moving files before they had all been
generated, depending on how many files I was generating in a batch.
My question is this: Are the workflow actions run as separate,
parallel threads of execution? That's certainly how it looks. I
would expect that each workflow action would need to complete before
the next one was started. Otherwise, how can you believe the output
of the previous step? You also end up in race conditions like I have
described.
Can anyone enlighten me? Am I doing something wrong?
Ben Waldie
President
Automated Workflows, LLC
610.935.0652
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