Workflow Retry Policies nil using Test Environment

Community Support
1

Hi all,

I’m exploring using Temporal for improving resilience of workflows. Currently my situation is such that I have a final activity in my workflow that should only to be triggered under the condition that the workflow is in its final attempt.

I’ve tried testing this with the unit test framework, where I’ve registered my workflows and mocked activities to test the retries. What I’ve noticed is that the activity retries behave as expected, but the workflow not. When I debug and check the dereference of the workflow retry policy, I find that the policy is always nil.

I have some questions regarding that:

  1. Does the unit test framework support workflow retries? Or are workflows accessed in the test framework always created with a nil retry policy?
  2. Is having a final activity triggered within the workflow based on workflow parameters the wrong approach? Perhaps a child workflow is a better approach? I only recently started using this technology, so I’m unsure what the proper approach is.

Any help is greatly appreciated :slight_smile: Thank you very much!

2

Can you describe your use case? Asking because workflow-based retries are typically not needed unless you might want to retry whole sequence of steps from beginning in your workflow code on any failure.

3

Hi @tihomir , thanks for the response!

Here’s the details: In a nutshell I’m building a data processing workflow. A requirement is to ensure the data is removed from the host system at the end of the workflow. However, to process the data, it has to be present, so I can’t remove it until all workflow retries are finished.