What else can I do to prevent duplicates?

[April]

I have a Script Listener that "hears" Created and Updated events and creates either 1 or 2 sub-tasks depending on various conditions. The task creation is fine, but at least twice a week, the script creates duplicate issues.

I think this is happening because we have an integration to Salesforce (Go2Group CRM Plugin) which can cause an issue to be updated 2 times in a second, and therefore multiple instances of the listener may be running at once.

In the log, I can see that we are sometimes going straight from detecting 0 sub-tasks to detecting 4, so my guess is that sometimes, I'm trying to detect sub-tasks which exist but have not been indexed yet.

I tried calling the indexer in the script as I created each task, but saw no improvement in detection rate, so I removed that. Also tried re-declaring the sub-task collection later in the script, in case a few extra milliseconds might help, which really didn't.

What can I do to decrease the incidence of duplicates? 

Would it make sense to focus on indexer performance, or add something else to the script, or just sleep for a second or two before trying to check for tasks?

Here's how I'm looking for duplicates in the script, and thanks for any ideas you have!

...

Collection subTasks = parentIssue.getSubTaskObjects()
if (!subTasks.find{it.getSummary().contains "Incident"}) {
 Blah blah }

[Ivan Tovbin · Accepted solution]

Hi April,

As blunt and simple it might sound but at least for testing purposes have you tried adding a post function to you sub task "Create" transition, which would fire a custom event. And then reconfigure your listener to listen to that custom event. If you place this post function LAST on your "Create" transition, then I think it should help you at least diagnose where your duplicates appear and best case scenario use this approach to get rid of duplicate listener launches all together.

[April]

Ivan, I think that helped!

After having that in place a few weeks now, duplicates are only happening when the other add-on fires 3+ updates in the same second, which is thankfully rare, and even then, I only get one dupe. 

Probably the only further improvement would be to improve indexing speed.

Thanks for the great idea!