When we restructure the workflow definition, what're the safe guidelines to change the activity/ function definition

Community Support
1

Hey Community,

I have a question about the deterministic errors when we restructure the activities I used in the workflow definition.

My workflow uses an activity in the first version,
fun SomeActivityX (a, b, c)
but now I wanna change it to the second version,
fun SomeActivityX(a, b, c, d=1)

  1. I am not sure how much the replay compares, does it compare entirely the original parameters to the new signature?
  2. And am I safe in directly changing the old SomeActivityX to the new one without adding version tags to it?

Background information we are building workflows in kotlin on top of java-sdk.

2

Such change doesn’t require versioning.

We recommend that production use cases use a single value type input argument. This has multiple benefits.

  • It is converted to a JSON with named properties. Positional arguments are converted to a JSON array. So their names are lost.
  • It is easier to make adding and removing properties from the value type backward compatible.
3

Thanks, Maxim, I wanna double confirm my understanding: so the change of parameter numbers doesn’t cause deterministic errors as long as the function still accepts only fun SomeActivityX(a, b, c, d=1)as default. so if I change the function to fun SomeActivityX(a, b, c, d) it will cause problem.

4

I’m confused. You asked about Java SDK. Java doesn’t support default parameter values.

5

we are using Kotlin on top of the Java-SDK. Maven Central Repository Search
so we can have something like.

image
image966×196 9.26 KB

I feel very uncertain when I reconstruct the workflow definition (workflow execution runtime data, signals, and activities are all to be modified). And I guess my uncertainty comes from I am not 100% sure about the details of the replay which I will dig into later.

And it is good to find the reply test mechanism. Also, I am thinking myself along the way if any light way can be found for a fast and more confident way of reconstruction of workflow definitions.