Hi @Scotty114,

what you are seeing is expected behaviour. As there is no way of telling which branch will run/complete first, variables cannot be shared between branches. Once all branches are complete the variables will be available to the rest of the workflow.

Surely this can’t be desirable behaviour though? There might be no way of telling which branch will run or complete first, but the workflow variables are updated at certain times (as shown) and steps that run temporally subsequent to that “set a variable value” action (in a different branch) should incorporate values from the current state of a workflow variable and not the initial state of the workflow variable pre-branching.

If I can store the current value of a workflow variable into something like Sharepoint or Smartsheets in one branch, and retrieve that same value in a second branch, then Nintex should be able to provide that functionality natively. I would be disappointed if the company did not consider this a significant limitation of the “run parallel paths” action.

Hi @Scotty114,

Thank you for your feedback.  I understand what you are saying but the action is deigned to run action paths simultaneously and independent of each other. As your senario requires different functionality you may need to look at using different actions to achieve your solution.

@SimonMuntz 

That’s good to know, and should really be included in the documentation (at least I can’t find it where I would expect it). I never would have expected it would have branch specific variables, as there’s no indication that it would behave that way. 

Can you give a fuller explanation for how each branch maintains it’s values for variables, but can still reference the workflows variables?  Is each branch treated like it’s own workflow, with each variable that exists when it starts being treated as an input variable? 

Thanks!

So to be clear, the variables are not global with the parallel branch action? Each branch gets the variables localized to their branch? And since that seems to be what you’re saying, which branch’s variables get used once you’re past the parallel branches. If var A = 0 before the parallel action, and A=1 on branch 1, and A=2 on branch 2, what is A equal to when you’re past the parallel action?

Hi @LukeR,

This question is not logical. If you wanted to perform this set of actions, you would run them sequentially and not in Parallel.
Your question assumes that the branches execute one after the other, but this is not the case.  The actions run in Parallel, and there is no way to configure the execution order. This is why actions that run in parallel should not reference each other, as you do not know if the dependent branch has run.