Alert for Old Cases: Recursive Workflow

Today, I continue to answer the question ‘what was the best way to use a workflow to send an email when a case had not been modified in 5 days?’ by discussing a potential solution using Recursive Workflow!

I have been discussing a few options for notifying users when they have cases assigned that have not been modified in several days. The goal of this is to send an email that will drive the users back in to D365 and so they will reach out and update the customer.

When this problem was brought up to me there were a few additional notes made:

1. On-premise and not interested in using Flow right now (although we are going to discuss that option later)
2. Most cases do not sit very long
3. Low volume of cases

So one option we discussed was using a recursive workflow, meaning a workflow that calls itself.

Here is the expected logic:

Building this as a workflow would look something like this:

There are a few problems with this approach. First of all, generally I am not a fan of wait conditions in a workflow. This is a timeout for 5 days which is a bit better than waiting for a specific condition, but there are a lot of workflows just sitting in your system waiting for their turn. Also there is a limit to the number of times this workflow will call itself (can someone fill in what that is?). That also makes me nervous about this solution.

Due to the low volume of cases maybe this is an option but not recommended.

Let’s look at an alternative workflow solution.

Next time, we’ll look at an alternative workflow solution via Workflow Based on Related Record. Be sure to check out the other solutions in this series and let me know in the comments below what you think of this solution!