Stop Tool being bypassed

[Scott_Kane]

In some workflows I have I use the Stop tool to coordinate publishing to a cloud data source. While running a workflow occasionally downstream tools finish before this tool "finishes". In the screen shot for example a file is completely written but the stop tool says it's 90% done.

How is this possible? Almost by definition doesn't everything behind the stop tool need to be 100% before it can proceed?

In other cases I've seen joins be at 60% and the downstream writing of files being at 100%. In general what do those percentages mean? Are they really accurate or just estimations? Any help would be much appreciated on this.

[echuong1 · Accepted solution]

The percentages in general are just estimations.

With regard to the block until done, it does not actually halt processing for each of the output nodes until they complete sequentially, they just slow down the processing to help with write conflicts. If you need to actually control the order of outputs completely, the only way to do this is with separate workflows and Runner macros, or self-built macros.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Knowledge-Base/Tool-Mastery-Block-Until-Done/ta-p/... 

[Emil_Kos]

Hi @echuong1,

I wasn't aware that is the case. thank you for sharing. 

[Scott_Kane]

Thanks for the quick response on this! The estimated numbers are kind of what I figured. With 100% not necessarily being true, or 90% either that now makes sense. That workflow is writing a file in to a cloud data source (HDFS) and then creating a table from it so it would be super problematic for those to happen out of order which is why we use the block tool.

thanks again!