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Use a Null Job

A Null Job does no work and finishes immediately. It's a workflow-design building block: a clean anchor point for organizing dependencies and events. It runs inside the platform, so it needs no agent and has no settings.

What this solves

As a workflow grows, wiring every job to every other for ordering, or hanging events on a real job that does unrelated work, makes the design tangled, hard to read, and fragile to change.

Use it when​

  • Simplifying dependencies: give many jobs a single shared predecessor or successor instead of wiring every job to every other (a clean many-to-one or one-to-many point).
  • Attaching events: provide a job to hang events on without performing real work.
  • Building on hold: act as a controllable placeholder when a workflow is built on hold.

Add a Null Job to a workflow​

To add a Null Job, complete the following steps:

  1. Go to Workflows and open the workflow you want to edit.
  2. Add a job: on an empty workflow select First Job, otherwise select New Job from the Job Tools panel.
  3. In the job editor, select the Job Definition tab.
  4. Select Show Job Types.
  5. In the job type catalog, under Internal, select Null Job.
  6. Select Save & Close. There are no parameters to set.
Good to know
  • A Null Job finishes OK as soon as it runs. It has no failure of its own. If one is waiting, it's waiting on its dependencies, which is by design.

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