Is It Allowed to Use Temporal Client in Activities for Workflow Status Check?

Community Support
1

Hi Temporal Community,

I need to periodically check if a child workflow has been canceled from within a parent workflow. However, I came across the following note in the documentation:

// Package client is used by external programs to communicate with Temporal service.
//
// NOTE: DO NOT USE THIS API INSIDE OF ANY WORKFLOW CODE!!!
package client

Given this constraint, what is the best practice for periodically checking the status of a child workflow?

Current Setup:

  1. Parent Workflow:
  • Starts a child workflow with WORKFLOW_ID_REUSE_POLICY_TERMINATE_IF_RUNNING.
  • Needs to periodically check if the child workflow is canceled.
  1. Activity for Checking Status: Defined an activity to get the status of a workflow:
package activities

import (
    "context"
    "go.temporal.io/sdk/client"
)

type Activities struct {
    TemporalClient client.Client
}

func (a *Activities) GetWorkflowStatus(ctx context.Context, workflowID, runID string) (string, error) {
    descResp, err := a.TemporalClient.DescribeWorkflowExecution(ctx, workflowID, runID)
    if err != nil {
        return "", err
    }
    return descResp.WorkflowExecutionInfo.Status.String(), nil
}

Questions:

  1. Is using an activity to check the workflow status using activity is the right approach? or is it forbidden as stated inside the client package

Thanks in advance for your help!

2

If a child is canceled, the Future that was returned from ExecuteChildWorkflow will be resolved. So there is no need to poll for status.