Workflow Pick activity not sending reply until Action complete

Question

I have a workflow that contains a Pick activity. Each PickBranch is triggered by a WCF request. The triggered branch then sends a response to the request and performs an Action activity. But the behaviour I'm seeing indicates the response is not being sent until the Action activity is complete which is causing the original request to timeout, depending on how long the Action activity takes to complete.

In the PickBranch above, I'm adding work orders to a mobile database. Each work order takes up to 16 seconds to be added to the database. As the number of work orders increases, the greater the likelihood that the original request will timeout. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Ok, I think I have a resolution for this. As per Maurice's answer here, I added a Delay activity following the SendReplyToReceive and the workflow then started behaving as expected.