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Failure Converter

This page discusses Failure Converter.

What is a Failure Converter?​

As with input and output, Temporal also uses its own default converter logic for errors that are generated by Workflows. The default Failure Converter copies error messages and call stacks as plain text, and this text output is then directly accessible in the Message field of these Workflow Executions.

This may be undesirable for your application. In some cases, errors could contain privileged or sensitive information that you would need to prevent from leaking or being available via a side channel. Failure messages and call stacks are not encoded as codec-capable Payloads by default; you must explicitly enable encoding these common attributes on failures.

If your errors might contain sensitive information, you can encrypt the message and call stack by configuring the default Failure Converter to use your encoding. This moves your message and stack_trace fields to a Payload that's run through your codec.

For example, with the Temporal Go SDK, you can do this by adding a FailureConverter parameter to your client.Options{} array when calling client.Dial(). The FailureConverter should override the DefaultFailureConverterOptions{} by setting EncodeCommonAttributes: true like so:

c, err := client.Dial(client.Options{
	// Set DataConverter here to ensure that workflow inputs and results are
	// encoded as required.
	DataConverter: mycustom.DataConverter,
	FailureConverter: temporal.NewDefaultFailureConverter(temporal.DefaultFailureConverterOptions{
		EncodeCommonAttributes: true,
	}),
})

If for some reason you need to specify a different set of Converter logic for your Failures, you can replace the NewDefaultFailureConverter with a custom method. For example, if you are both working with highly sensitive data and using a sophisticated logging/observability implementation, you may need to implement different encryption methods for each of them.