By advancing with immediate dialog, you speed up the processing of a workflow if more than one subsequent step of a workflow is to be processed by the same user.

The flag Advance with immediate dialog can either be set for each step individually or for the whole workflow.

The runtime system behaving in this way means that a work item is no longer offered to all recipients for processing, because the first agent in such a chain of work items automatically becomes the actual agent of subsequent work items.

If the indicator is set for the first step of a workflow, and the workflow is started in dialog, the workflow system checks whether the workflow initiator is also a recipient of the first work item If this is the case, work item execution is started immediately.

At runtime, after completion of a step, (= work item has status completed), the workflow system checks the following properties of the subsequent work item:

If the answer to all these questions is yes, the workflow system automatically starts execution of the work item.

The check described above is carried out with the subsequent step if it has one of the following types:

• Process control
• Condition
• Container operation
• Multiple condition
• Fork
• Loop (UNTIL)
• Loop (WHILE)

You activate or deactivate advance with immediate dialog in the basic data of a workflow definition. If you change the setting in the basic data, the change is valid for all steps of the workflow. The first time the Workflow Builder is called, advance with immediate dialog is always activated.

If advance with immediate dialog is activated in the basic data, you can also activate or deactivate the indicator for each individual step. This setting then refers only to advancing from the preceding step to this step.