25.1.8 Understanding Background Execution

Workflows run in a background session without page session state or a logged-in user.

The APEX engine manages the progress of workflow instances asynchronously in the background. It processes each instance's next activity in a distinct engine session with no logged-in user. A workflow engine session is also different from the user session created for each end user of your application's pages.

By design, two consequences are:

• a workflow instance has no access to session state values from application pages, and
• evaluating APP_USER returns nobody in a workflow.

Therefore, any value your workflow depends on needs to be:

• A built-in APEX workflow substitution (e.g. APEX$WORKFLOW_INITIATOR),
• An Additional Data column,
• Saved in a table, so an activity can query it,
• Passed as a parameter value to the workflow instance at start time,
• Stored in a workflow variable by an earlier activity, or
• Saved to an updatable task parameter accessible via APEX_HUMAN_TASK API.