Unexpected behavior when using Elsa.AzureServiceBus.MessageReceived in a loop

[ilivit]

I've found an unexpected behavior of a workflow when there's a loop that contains a MessageReceived activity.

The workflow is a simple for loop with the MessageReceived activity followed by the decision activity which checks the message content and decides wether to break the loop. See workflow-3-1.json.

After recieving the first message the next iterations are not waiting for the next message but reusing the same message that came once. This causes the cycle completes in a blink ignoring the following messages and breaking the logic.

After some debugging I've found that it might be caused by the WorkflowInbox. After submitting a message once it dispatches it again and again.

Is this a desired behavior? How can I work around this? I tried to create a cusom activity similar to MessageReceived and use workflowRuntime.DispatchAsync() in the queue message consumer but it leads to the lost message situations when a message comes before the bookmark is stored.

[glime-ai[bot]]

Based on the context provided, it seems that you are experiencing an issue where the MessageReceived activity within a loop is not behaving as expected. Instead of waiting for new messages in each iteration, it reuses the first received message, causing the loop to complete without waiting for subsequent messages.

This behavior is not desired if you expect each iteration of the loop to wait for a new message. The issue might be related to how the WorkflowInbox is handling messages, as you've identified.

To work around this issue, you might consider the following approaches:

1. Ensure Unique Messages: Make sure that each message is unique and can be correlated with the correct iteration of the loop. This might involve including iteration-specific data in the messages.

2. Custom Activity: Create a custom activity that extends the MessageReceived activity to handle the message consumption logic as per your requirements.

3. External Coordination: Use an external service or database to keep track of which messages have been processed and which ones are pending. This way, you can ensure that each loop iteration waits for the correct message.

4. Workflow Design: Revisit the workflow design to see if there's a way to structure it such that it naturally handles messages in the desired order without relying on the loop.

5. Check for Updates or Fixes: Since you've identified this as a potential issue with the WorkflowInbox, check the Elsa GitHub repository for any updates, bug fixes, or discussions related to this behavior. It's possible that this is a known issue with a solution or workaround already available.

6. Community and Support: Reach out to the Elsa community or support channels with your specific use case. Other users or the developers might have encountered similar issues and could offer insights or solutions.

If you are still unable to resolve the issue, consider providing a detailed bug report on the Elsa GitHub repository, including the workflow definition and steps to reproduce the issue. This could help the maintainers identify and address the problem in future releases.

[jdevillard]

Hello,

Indeed, this is not the desired behavior. I think it's a bug because we already discuss this kind of behavior with @sfmskywalker before. And change we made to inbox was supposed to do the job.

Thanks for you sample.

I'll take a look.