Workflow Interface
Workflow encapsulates the orchestration of Activities and child Workflows. It can also answer synchronous queries and receive external events (also known as signals).
A Workflow must define an interface class. A Workflow interface class must be annotated with @WorkflowInterface
.
All of its methods must have one of the following annotations:
- @WorkflowMethod indicates an entry point to a Workflow. It contains parameters such as timeouts and a task queue.
Required parameters (such as
executionStartToCloseTimeoutSeconds
) that are not specified through the annotation must be provided at runtime. - @SignalMethod indicates a method that reacts to external signals. It must have a
void
return type. - @QueryMethod indicates a method that reacts to synchronous query requests. It must have a non
void
return type.
You can have more than one method with the same annotation (except @WorkflowMethod). For example:
Note that name parameter of Workflow method annotations can be used to specify name of Workflow, signal and query types.
If name is not specified the short name of the Workflow interface separated by underscore with the method name is used.
In the above code the @WorkflowMethod.name is not specified, thus the Workflow type defaults to "FileProcessingWorkflow_processFile"
.
We recommended that you use a single value type argument for all types of Workflow methods. This way, adding new arguments as fields to the value type is a backwards-compatible change.
#
Workflow Interface InheritanceWorkflow interfaces can form inheritance hierarchies. It may be useful for creating components reusable across multiple
Workflow types. For example imaging a UI or CLI button that allows to call retryNow
signal on any Workflow. To implement
this feature you can redesign the above interface to:
Then some other Workflow can implement it as well:
Then it would be possible to send signal to both of them using the Retryable interface only:
The same technique can be used to query Workflows through a base interface.
Note that an attempt to start Workflow through a base interface annotated with @WorkflowInterface
is not going to work.
Let's look at the following invalid example:
An attempt to register implementations of Workflow1 and Workflow2 are going to fail as they are going to use the same
Workflow type. The type is defined by the type of the class which is annotated with @WorkflowInterface. In this case BaseWorkflow
.
The solution is to remove @WorkflowInterface annotation from BaseWorkflow. The following is valid code:
Implementations of Workflow1 and Workflow2 can registered with the same worker as they will have types defined by their interfaces.