Documentation
¶
Overview ¶
Package activity contains functions and types used to implement Temporal Activities.
An Activity is an implementation of a task to be performed as part of a larger Workflow. There is no limitation of what an Activity can do. In the context of a Workflow, it is in the Activities where all operations that affect the desired results must be implemented.
Overview ¶
Temporal Go SDK does all the heavy lifting of handling the async communication between the Temporal managed service and the Worker running the Activity. As such, the implementation of the Activity can, for the most part, focus on the business logic. The sample code below shows the implementation of a simple Activity that accepts a string parameter, appends a word to it and then returns the result.
import (
"context"
"go.temporal.io/sdk/activity"
)
func SimpleActivity(ctx context.Context, value string) (string, error) {
activity.GetLogger(ctx).Info("SimpleActivity called.", "Value", value)
return "Processed: ” + value, nil
}
The following sections explore the elements of the above code.
Declaration ¶
In the Temporal programing model, an Activity is implemented with a function. The function declaration specifies the parameters the Activity accepts as well as any values it might return. An Activity function can take zero or many Activity specific parameters and can return one or two values. It must always at least return an error value. The Activity function can accept as parameters and return as results any serializable type.
func SimpleActivity(ctx context.Context, value string) (string, error)
The first parameter to the function is context.Context. This is an optional parameter and can be omitted. This parameter is the standard Go context.
The second string parameter is a custom Activity-specific parameter that can be used to pass in data into the Activity on start. An Activity can have one or more such parameters. All parameters to an Activity function must be serializable, which essentially means that params can’t be channels, functions, variadic, or unsafe pointer.
The Activity declares two return values: (string, error). The string return value is used to return the result of the Activity. The error return value is used to indicate an error was encountered during execution.
Implementation ¶
There is nothing special about Activity code. You can write Activity implementation code the same way you would any other Go service code. You can use the usual loggers and metrics collectors. You can use the standard Go concurrency constructs.
Context Cancellation ¶
The first parameter to an activity function can be an optional context.Context. The context will be cancelled when: * The activity function returns. * The context deadline is exceeded. The deadline is calculated based on the minimum of the ScheduleToClose timeout plus the activity task scheduled time and the StartToClose timeout plus the activity task start time. * The activity calls RecordHeartbeat after being cancelled by the Temporal server.
Failing the Activity ¶
To mark an Activity as failed, all that needs to happen is for the Activity function to return an error via the error return value.
Activity Heartbeating ¶
For long running Activities, Temporal provides an API for the Activity code to report both liveness and progress back to the Temporal managed service.
progress := 0
for hasWork {
// send heartbeat message to the server
activity.RecordHeartbeat(ctx, progress)
// do some work
...
progress++
}
When the Activity times out due to a missed heartbeat, the last value of the details (progress in the above sample) is returned from the [workflow.ExecuteActivity] function as the details field of [temporal.TimeoutError] with TimeoutType_HEARTBEAT.
It is also possible to heartbeat an Activity from an external source:
// instantiate a Temporal service Client client.Client client = client.Dial(...) // record heartbeat err := client.RecordActivityHeartbeat(ctx, taskToken, details)
It expects an additional parameter, "taskToken", which is the value of the binary "TaskToken" field of the activity.Info retrieved inside the Activity (GetActivityInfo(ctx).TaskToken). "details" is the serializable payload containing progress information.
Activity Cancellation ¶
When an Activity is canceled (or its Workflow execution is completed or failed) the context passed into its function is canceled which sets its Done channel’s closed state. So an Activity can use that to perform any necessary cleanup and abort its execution. Currently cancellation is delivered only to Activities that call RecordHeartbeat.
Async/Manual Activity Completion ¶
In certain scenarios completing an Activity upon completion of its function is not possible or desirable.
One example would be the UberEATS order processing Workflow that gets kicked off once an eater pushes the “Place Order” button. Here is how that Workflow could be implemented using Temporal and the “async Activity completion”:
- Activity 1: send order to restaurant
- Activity 2: wait for restaurant to accept order
- Activity 3: schedule pickup of order
- Activity 4: wait for courier to pick up order
- Activity 5: send driver location updates to eater
- Activity 6: complete order
Activities 2 & 4 in the above flow require someone in the restaurant to push a button in the Uber app to complete the Activity. The Activities could be implemented with some sort of polling mechanism. However, they can be implemented much simpler and much less resource intensive as a Temporal Activity that is completed asynchronously.
There are 2 parts to implementing an asynchronously completed Activity. The first part is for the Activity to provide the information necessary to be able to be completed from an external system and notify the Temporal service that it is waiting for that outside callback:
// retrieve Activity information needed to complete Activity asynchronously activityInfo := activity.GetInfo(ctx) taskToken := activityInfo.TaskToken // send the taskToken to external service that will complete the Activity ... // return from Activity function indicating the Temporal should wait for an async completion message return "", activity.ErrResultPending
The second part is then for the external service to call the Temporal service to complete the Activity. To complete the Activity successfully you would do the following:
// instantiate a Temporal service Client // the same client can be used complete or fail any number of Activities client.Client client = client.NewClient(...) // complete the Activity client.CompleteActivity(taskToken, result, nil)
And here is how you would fail the Activity:
// fail the Activity client.CompleteActivity(taskToken, nil, err)
The parameters of the CompleteActivity function are:
- taskToken: This is the value of the binary “TaskToken” field of the “ActivityInfo” struct retrieved inside the Activity.
- result: This is the return value that should be recorded for the Activity. The type of this value needs to match the type of the return value declared by the Activity function.
- err: The error code to return if the Activity should terminate with an error.
If error is not null the value of the result field is ignored.
For a full example of implementing this pattern see the Expense sample.
Registration ¶
In order to for some Workflow execution to be able to invoke an Activity type, the Worker process needs to be aware of all the implementations it has access to. To do that, create a Worker and register the Activity like so:
c, err := client.Dial(client.Options{})
if err != nil {
log.Fatalln("unable to create Temporal client", err)
}
defer c.Close()
w := worker.New(c, "SomeTaskQueue", worker.Options{})
w.RegisterActivity(SomeActivityFunction)
This call essentially creates an in-memory mapping inside the Worker process between the fully qualified function name and the implementation. Unlike in Amazon SWF, Workflow and Activity types are not registered with the managed service. If the Worker receives a request to start an Activity execution for an Activity type it does not know it will fail that request.
Index ¶
- Variables
- func GetHeartbeatDetails(ctx context.Context, d ...interface{}) error
- func GetLogger(ctx context.Context) log.Logger
- func GetMetricsHandler(ctx context.Context) metrics.Handler
- func GetWorkerStopChannel(ctx context.Context) <-chan struct{}
- func HasHeartbeatDetails(ctx context.Context) bool
- func IsActivity(ctx context.Context) bool
- func RecordHeartbeat(ctx context.Context, details ...interface{})
- type Info
- type RegisterOptions
- type Type
Constants ¶
This section is empty.
Variables ¶
var ErrResultPending = internal.ErrActivityResultPending
ErrResultPending is returned from activity's implementation to indicate the activity is not completed when the activity method returns. Activity needs to be completed by Client.CompleteActivity() separately. For example, if an activity requires human interaction (like approving an expense report), the activity could return ErrResultPending, which indicates the activity is not done yet. Then, when the waited human action happened, it needs to trigger something that could report the activity completed event to the temporal server via the Client.CompleteActivity() API.
Functions ¶
func GetHeartbeatDetails ¶
GetHeartbeatDetails extracts heartbeat details from the last failed attempt. This is used in combination with the retry policy. An activity could be scheduled with an optional retry policy on ActivityOptions. If the activity failed, then server would attempt to dispatch another activity task to retry according to the retry policy. If there were heartbeat details reported by activity from the failed attempt, the details would be delivered along with the activity task for the retry attempt. An activity can extract the details from GetHeartbeatDetails() and resume progress from there. See TestActivityEnvironment.SetHeartbeatDetails() for unit test support.
Note: Values should not be reused for extraction here because merging on top of existing values may result in unexpected behavior similar to json.Unmarshal.
func GetMetricsHandler ¶ added in v1.12.0
GetMetricsHandler returns a metrics handler that can be used in the activity.
func GetWorkerStopChannel ¶
GetWorkerStopChannel returns a read-only channel. The closure of this channel indicates the activity worker is stopping. When the worker is stopping, it will close this channel and wait until the worker stop timeout finishes. After the timeout hits, the worker will cancel the activity context and then exit. The timeout can be defined by worker option: WorkerStopTimeout. Use this channel to handle a graceful activity exit when the activity worker stops.
func HasHeartbeatDetails ¶
HasHeartbeatDetails checks if there are heartbeat details from the last attempt.
func IsActivity ¶ added in v1.24.0
IsActivity checks if the context is an activity context from a normal or local activity.
func RecordHeartbeat ¶
RecordHeartbeat sends a heartbeat for the currently executing activity. If the activity is either canceled or the workflow/activity doesn't exist, then we would cancel the context with error context.Canceled.
details - The details that you provide here can be seen in the workflow when it receives TimeoutError. You can check error with TimeoutType()/Details().
Note: If using asynchronous activity completion, after returning ErrResultPending users should heartbeat with [client.Client.RecordActivityHeartbeat]
Types ¶
type Info ¶
type Info = internal.ActivityInfo
Info contains information about a currently executing activity.
type RegisterOptions ¶
type RegisterOptions = internal.RegisterActivityOptions
RegisterOptions consists of options for registering an activity.
Source Files