Why are Workflow Manager related properties so much slower in ArcGIS Pro than they are in the desktop application?

Question

Is there a reason that accessing Workflow Manager (Classic) related properties through the 'Related Properties' tab appears to be so much slower in ArcGIS Pro than it does in the stand alone Workflow Manager desktop application? We use the related properties a lot in our Workflows for things like showing details of a jobs deliverables/outputs, however, our users are finding that after switching to using Workflow Manager in ArcGIS Pro the process can often be so slow to retrieve the data and display it that they find it unbearable, often avoiding the process entirely and reverting back to the stand alone application.

MJames · Answer

Sorry I should have made that clearer, some tables would have a 1000 plus records (jobs) but the most fields we have in a single table would be 10 or so.

We have tested running what we believe would be the same query executed by the related properties tab outside of Workflow Manager (both directly in sql as well as in pro as a query layer) and have found that the Workflow Manager related tab is always slower, its even slow just to determine what tables it needs to show under that tab even when there is no actual data in them related to that job.

Anonymous User · Answer

Thanks @MJames

So you have a table with a thousand fields? Or a thousand records? Aka. A thousand jobs.

I do think our performance should be better than what you're indicating for Pro when compared to ArcMap, although historically accessing Enterprise data has had issues in Pro for some use cases. If it isn't the case, it is something we will look into.

Could you try one thing, could you run a query to return the related properties for a job but outside of Workflow Manager. Just adding the tables in Pro and creating the query, and let us know what its performance is like compared to Workflow Manager extracting the same job in that tab.

MJames · Answer

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the reply, generally we only have 2 separate related properties tables at most on a single job template.

As for how many properties are there in the table, it varies but can get quiet large (a few 1000). however only a handful of these would be related to a single job (1-4 normally).

The data types are normally integers and maybe some strings.

Anecdotally, we have noticed that a lot of related records against a single job, say more than 20, will have a significant increase in the time taken to retrieve the records when compared to say 2 records, however this increase seems normal/expected to us.

Our main concern is the difference between the standalone desktop Workflow Manager application and ArcGIS Pro, with the standalone app showing almost instant retrieval and the same records in Pro always slower to retrieve. We have tested this on multiple separate deployments and have experienced the same results. If you believe this should not be the case and the same performance should be expected between ArcGIS Pro and the standalone app than I will submit a support case to chase this up.