Data Propagation in TPL Dataflow Pipeline with Batchblock.Triggerbatch()

Question

In my Producer-Consumer scenario, I have multiple consumers, and each of the consumers send an action to external hardware, which may take some time. My Pipeline looks somewhat

Answer 1

I have found that using TriggerBatch in this way is unreliable:

    _groupReadTags.Post(10);
    _groupReadTags.Post(20);
    _groupReadTags.TriggerBatch();

Apparently TriggerBatch is intended to be used inside the block, not outside it like this. I have seen this result in odd timing issues, like items from next batch batch being included in the current batch, even though TriggerBatch was called first.

Please see my answer to this question for an alternative using DataflowBlock.Encapsulate: BatchBlock produces batch with elements sent after TriggerBatch()