We recently updated our supplier onboarding workflow in Aras 14.0 to add additional approval steps. Since the update, the automated email notifications to new suppliers are no longer being sent after the workflow completes. The workflow itself executes successfully and transitions to the final state, but suppliers aren’t receiving their welcome emails with portal access credentials.
I’ve verified the workflow notification setup in the workflow map - the Email Message activity is still configured and points to the correct email template. The SMTP configuration in the system settings appears unchanged. I also checked that the supplier email field is populated correctly in the Supplier ItemType. The email activity shows as completed in the workflow history without errors, but no emails are actually delivered.
Has anyone encountered similar issues after modifying workflows? I’m wondering if there’s a specific configuration step related to email notifications that needs to be refreshed or if there’s a caching issue with workflow definitions.
Thanks for the suggestions. I cleared the workflow cache and restarted IIS but still no emails. Checked the from_user identity and it’s correctly set to our system admin account which has worked before. The Event Viewer shows no SMTP errors. However, I noticed in the workflow history that the Email Message activity completes in under 1 second, which seems suspiciously fast. When I test the SMTP configuration using the built-in test function in Administration > Email Settings, test emails are delivered successfully.
I ran into this exact scenario last month. Here’s the complete solution addressing all three areas:
Workflow Notification Setup: The issue is likely in how your Email Message activity references the recipient. Open your workflow map, select the Email Message activity, and check the ‘to_id’ assignment. It should use a path expression like ${source_id.owned_by_id.email} or reference the supplier’s email field directly. When you updated the workflow, if you copied the activity, the path binding may have broken.
SMTP Configuration: While your SMTP settings test successfully, verify the ‘Allowed Senders’ configuration. Go to Administration > Email Settings and check if your workflow identity (the user account the workflow runs under) is in the allowed senders list. Aras 14.0 introduced stricter email security policies. Add your workflow service account explicitly:
AllowedSenders: admin, workflow_service, system
Supplier Email Field: The most common issue is the email field mapping. In your Email Message activity properties, the ‘to_id’ field must point to an identity with an email address. If you’re referencing the Supplier item directly, you need to ensure it has a related User identity. Check your Supplier ItemType - add a relationship to the User ItemType if missing, or modify your workflow to use:
<to_id>${source_id.managed_by_id}</to_id>
This assumes your Supplier has a ‘managed_by_id’ property linking to a User.
Additional Steps:
- Enable workflow trace logging: Set
workflow.trace=true in InnovatorServerConfig.xml
- Re-promote your workflow to ensure all activities are properly initialized
- Create a test supplier and manually trigger the workflow while monitoring the logs
- Check the Email Queue table (innovator.EMAIL_QUEUE) to see if messages are queued but failing to send
The combination of proper identity mapping, allowed sender configuration, and cache clearing should resolve the issue. The instant completion you’re seeing suggests the activity is skipping execution due to a missing or invalid recipient reference.
Also check the Supplier ItemType relationship to ensure the email property is actually being populated during creation. We had an issue where a form field was bound to a different property than what the workflow was referencing. The workflow was looking for ‘email_address’ but the form was populating ‘contact_email’. Simple mismatch but took us days to find.
That instant completion is definitely suspicious. Double-check your Email Message activity configuration - specifically look at the ‘message’ field. If the message field reference is broken or pointing to a non-existent email template, the activity will complete without actually sending anything. Navigate to Administration > Email Messages and verify your template still exists with the correct name. When workflows are copied or updated, template references can break if they’re using display names instead of IDs.
I’ve seen this before. The workflow engine caches workflow definitions aggressively. After making changes to workflow maps, you need to clear the server cache. Go to Administration > Cache Manager and clear the Workflow Process cache specifically. Then restart your IIS application pool. Also worth checking the Application log in Event Viewer for any SMTP connection failures that might not surface in the Aras UI.
Check the Email Message activity properties in your workflow. When you copy or modify workflow definitions, sometimes the identity assignment gets lost. Go to the Email Message activity, open properties, and verify the ‘from_user’ is set to a valid identity with email sending permissions. Also check if ‘to_id’ is properly mapped to your supplier email field.