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Workflows

In this guide, you'll learn how to make your applications reliable using workflows.

Workflows orchestrate the execution of other functions, like transactions and communicators. Workflows are reliable: if their execution is interrupted for any reason (e.g., an executor is restarted or crashes), DBOS automatically resumes them from where they left off, running them to completion without re-executing any operation that already finished. You can use workflows to coordinate multiple operations that must all complete for a program to be correct. For example, in our e-commerce demo, we use a workflow for payment processing.

Workflows must be annotated with the @Workflow decorator and must have a WorkflowContext as their first argument. Like for other functions, inputs and outputs must be serializable to JSON. Additionally, workflows must be deterministic.

Here's an example workflow from the programming guide. It signs an online guestbook then records the signature in the database. By using a workflow, we guarantee that every guestbook signature is recorded in the database, even if execution is interrupted.

class Greetings {

  // Other function implementations

    @Workflow()
    @GetApi("/greeting/:friend")
    static async Greeting(ctxt: HandlerContext, friend: string) {
      const noteContent = `Thank you for being awesome, ${friend}!`;
      await ctxt.invoke(Greetings).SignGuestbook(friend);
      await ctxt.invoke(Greetings).InsertGreeting(
        { name: friend, note: noteContent }
      );
      return noteContent;
    }

}

Invoking Functions from Workflows​

Workflows can invoke transactions and communicators using their ctxt.invoke() method. For example, this line from our above example invokes the transaction InsertGreeting:

await ctxt.invoke(Greetings).InsertGreeting(friend, noteContent);

The syntax for invoking function fn(args) in class Cls is ctxt.invoke(Cls).fn(args).

You can also invoke other workflows with the ctxt.invokeWorkflow() method. The syntax for invoking workflow wf in class Cls with argument arg is:

const output = await ctxt.invokeWorkflow(Cls).wf(arg);

Reliability Guarantees​

Workflows provide the following reliability guarantees. These guarantees assume that the application and database may crash and go offline at any point in time, but are always restarted and return online.

  1. Workflows always run to completion. If a DBOS process crashes while executing a workflow and is restarted, it resumes the workflow from where it left off.
  2. Transactions commit exactly once. Once a workflow commits a transaction, it will never retry that transaction.
  3. Communicators are tried at least once but are never re-executed after they successfully complete. If a failure occurs inside a communicator, the communicator may be retried, but once a communicator has completed, it will never be re-executed.

For safety, DBOS automatically attempts to recover a workflow a set number of times. If a workflow exceeds this limit, its status is set to RETRIES_EXCEEDED and it is no longer retried automatically, though it may be retried manually. This acts as a dead letter queue so that a buggy workflow that crashes its application (for example, by running it out of memory) is not retried infinitely. The maximum number of retries is by default 50, but this may be configured through arguments to the @Workflow decorator.

Determinism​

A workflow implementation must be deterministic: if called multiple times with the same inputs, it should invoke the same transactions and communicators with the same inputs in the same order. If you need to perform a non-deterministic operation like accessing the database, calling a third-party API, generating a random number, or getting the local time, you shouldn't do it directly in a workflow function. Instead, you should do all database operations in transactions and all other non-deterministic operations in communicators. You can safely invoke these methods from a workflow.

For example, don't do this:

class Example {
    @Workflow()
    static async exampleWorkflow(ctxt: WorkflowContext) {
        // Don't make an HTTP request in a workflow function
        const body = await fetch("https://example.com").then(r => r.text()); 
        await ctxt.invoke(Example).exampleTransaction(body);
    }
}

Do this instead:

class Example {
    @Communicator()
    static async fetchBody(ctxt: CommunicatorContext) {
      // Instead, make HTTP requests in communicators
      return await fetch("https://example.com").then(r => r.text());
    }

    @Workflow()
    static async exampleWorkflow(ctxt: WorkflowContext) {
        const body = await ctxt.invoke(Example).fetchBody();
        await ctxt.invoke(Example).exampleTransaction(body);
    }
}

Workflow Identity​

Every time you execute a workflow, that execution is assigned a unique identity, represented as a UUID. You can access this UUID through the context.workflowUUID field. Workflow identities are important for communicating with workflows and developing interactive workflows. For more information on workflow communication, see our guide.

Asynchronous Workflows​

Because workflows are often long-running, DBOS supports starting workflows asynchronously without waiting for them to complete. When you start a workflow from a handler or another workflow with handlerCtxt.startWorkflow or workflowCtxt.startWorkflow, the invocation returns a workflow handle:

  @GetApi(...)
  static async exampleHandler(handlerCtxt: HandlerContext, ...) {
    const handle = await handlerCtxt.startWorkflow(Class).workflow(...);
  }

Calls to start a workflow resolve as soon as the handle is safely created; at this point the workflow is guaranteed to run to completion. This behavior is useful if you need to quickly acknowledge receipt of an event then process it asynchronously (for example, in a webhook).

You can also retrieve another workflow's handle using its identity:

  @GetApi(...)
  static async exampleHandler(ctxt: HandlerContext, workflowIdentity: string, ...) {
    const handle = await ctxt.retrieveWorkflow(workflowIdentity);
  }

To wait for a workflow to complete and retrieve its result, await handle.getResult():

const handle = await ctxt.retrieveWorkflow(workflowIdentity)
const result = await handle.getResult();

For more information on workflow handles, see their reference page.

Workflow Management​

You can use the DBOS Transact CLI to manage your application's workflows. It provides the following commands:

Further Reading​

To learn how to make workflows (or other functions) idempotent, see our idempotency guide.

To learn how to make workflows interactive (for example, to handle user input), see our workflow communication guide.