How to get the workflow execution details other than Temporal web UI

Support
#1

Team,

As we are yet to implement the authentication in Temporal web UI we wanted to find the details of a workflow execution from temporal-cli or from some other source.

We wanted to get the Summary, History, Stacktrace, and Query details of workflow execution.

Is there any way to get that?

#3

Stacktrace

You can get the stack trace for running workflow executions via the QueryWorkflowRequest and the built-in “__stack_trace” query, for example:


QueryWorkflowRequest req =
                QueryWorkflowRequest.newBuilder()
                        .setNamespace(client.getOptions().getNamespace())
                        .setQuery(WorkflowQuery.newBuilder()
                                .setQueryType("__stack_trace").build())
                        .setExecution(workflowExecution)
                        .build();
        QueryWorkflowResponse res = service.blockingStub().queryWorkflow(req);
        String trace = res.getQueryResult();

If you have the workflow id and runid as string you can build your WorkflowExecution instance with for example:

WorkflowExecution execution = WorkflowExecution.newBuilder()
                .setWorkflowId("myworkflowid")
                .setRunId("myworkflowrunid")
                .build();
#4

Summary

You can get this via DescribeWorkflowExecution api, for example:

DescribeWorkflowExecutionRequest req =
                    DescribeWorkflowExecutionRequest.newBuilder()
                            .setNamespace(client.getOptions().getNamespace())
                            .setExecution(info.getExecution()).build();
            DescribeWorkflowExecutionResponse res =
                    service.blockingStub().describeWorkflowExecution(req);

The top section info of the web-ui summary page you can get via

WorkflowExecutionInfo info = res.getWorkflowExecutionInfo();
// ....

Pending activities are also available from the response:

List<PendingActivityInfo> pendingActivitiesList = describeWorkflowExecutionResponse.getPendingActivitiesList();

#5

History

You can get workflow history as JSON via SDK as well, via GetWorkflowExecutionHistory api:


GetWorkflowExecutionHistoryRequest request =
                GetWorkflowExecutionHistoryRequest.newBuilder()
                        .setNamespace("default")
                        .setExecution(WorkflowExecution.newBuilder()
                                .setWorkflowId(wfId)
                                .setRunId(wfRunId)
                                .build())
                        .build();
        String history = new WorkflowExecutionHistory(
                service.blockingStub().getWorkflowExecutionHistory(request).getHistory()).toJson(true);
#6

Query

You can use QueryWorkflow api like with the stack trace but provide your query type (query name which is by default the name of your QueryMethod).

#7

Thanks for the response @tihomir

It can be only done via Java Code.
Can we achieve it from temporal-cli or by querying the database?

#9

You should not have to query your db for any of this (its also not recommended), rather use tctl (cli) or your sdk apis.

For tctl:

Stack trace

tctl wf stack -h

Query

tctl wf query -h

History

tctl wf show -h

to store json to file:
tctl wf show -w <wfid> -r <runid> --output_filename myhistory.json

Summary

tctl wf desc -h

There is also docs on this here.