Unexpected behavior with empty Procedure Groups

Samir Jones

Cloud Version 12.6.

This might be considered a bug, but I will report this as an Idea of changing Procedure behavior.

When a Procedure contains an empty Group, Board will immediately jump to the group below and consider the steps from the group bellow to belong to the empty group.

However, if the empty group instead has a disabled step, then the flow works as expected.

Suggestion: An empty group should still be considered as a valid group.

You might wonder why you would use an empty group.
It is common when developing Procedures, and you try to put a framework for the Procedure setup. When testing the Procedure you might run it with breakpoints, before you are done developing. Those testing can involve undeveloped empty groups.
The use of empty groups can also be a reminder of future development in the Procedure.

Here is an example of how Board doesn't consider empty Groups.

The "Go to group" steps are placed in order.

Here's the setup with Groups. Note that 4 is placed after 2, and 7 is placed after 5.

These are the messages presented in order when running the Procedure.

Ivano Savogin

Hi Samir, good morning.
Thanks for sharing this interesting findings. I am Ivano, from Product Support and I have taken the related case you opened on our ticketing platform. I found it really interesting and worth of a debate with developers, at least to define the expected behavior by design and, in case, at least some additional details on user manual.

I'll keep you updated about my findings.

Regards

Ivano

Samir Jones

@Ivano Savogin, thank you. :-)