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Workflow reuse policy docs confusing

Open amcurative opened this issue 2 years ago • 0 comments

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Docs are a bit confusing and contradictory on the workflow id reuse policy

On this page https://docs.temporal.io/workflows#workflow-id-reuse-policy it says:

The Workflow Id Reuse Policy can have one of the following values:

Allow Duplicate: The Workflow Execution is allowed to exist regardless of the Closed status of a previous Workflow Execution with the same Workflow Id. This is the default policy, if one is not specified. Use this when it is OK to have a Workflow Execution with the same Workflow Id as a previous, but now Closed, Workflow Execution.

Its contradictory because it says "The Workflow Execution is allowed to exist regardless of the Closed status of a previous Workflow Execution" which means closed status does not matter but then later it says "Use this when it is OK to have a Workflow Execution with the same Workflow Id as a previous, but now Closed, Workflow Execution." which means it does care about Closed.

Digging I found this post: https://community.temporal.io/t/execute-a-workflow-multi-times-with-the-same-workflowid/6031/3 where someone says

WORKFLOW_ID_REUSE_POLICY_ALLOW_DUPLICATE is the default behavior, the term “Allow duplicate” can be a bit confusing, it allows you to reuse the workflowId when there is no other workflow running with the same workflowId.

So I take that to mean that with this policy, if there is a current execution, it won't start another one with the same id. Only if all existing runs have closed out and there is no active running workflow with this id, it will execute.

please see enums package - go.temporal.io/api/enums/v1 - Go Packages 4

Describe the solution you'd like

Update the docs to reflect the correct behavior

Describe alternatives you've considered

None

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amcurative avatar Aug 10 '23 19:08 amcurative