Getting failure details for a FAILED workflow via sdk

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1

Is there a means to get the failure details for a FAILED workflow with information like stack trace, exceptions, timeout details etc?

I can see a means to get that detail for RUNNING workflows which have failing retryable activities using describeWorkflowExecutionResponse.getPendingActivitiesList().get(0).getLastFailure() but the same method wouldn’t work for FAILED workflows as PendingActivitiesList would be empty.

I see that this information is available in the Temporal web UI (under Summary tab for a particular execution) but I was looking to see if it was possible to get the same information via the Java SDK.

3

Hi @ali_akbar

for failed workflows you can attach to the failed workflow execution by using newWorkflowStub method for a known execution and then get the failure via getResult:

   MyWorkflow myFailedWorkflow =
        client.newWorkflowStub(
            MyWorkflow.class,
            "<workflow_id>",
            Optional.of("<workflow_run_id>"));
    WorkflowStub untyped = WorkflowStub.fromTyped(myFailedWorkflow);
    try {
      untyped.getResult(String.class);
    } catch (WorkflowFailedException e) {
      // ...
      if (e.getCause() instanceof ActivityFailure) {
        ActivityFailure activityFailure = (ActivityFailure) e.getCause();
        // ...
      }
      if (e.getCause() instanceof ChildWorkflowFailure) {
        ChildWorkflowFailure childWorkflowFailure = (ChildWorkflowFailure) e.getCause();
      }
      // ...
    }
1 Like
4

Thanks for the quick response. This approach seems to solve my use case. :smiley:

For my solution, I already had the WorkflowExecution object so I just went ahead and created an untyped stub like so and the rest was pretty much the same:

WorkflowStub untypedStub = client.newUntypedWorkflowStub(workflowExecution, Optional.empty());