Best Practice to Stop/Abort/Cancel a running workflow

[tzu...@gmail.com]

Hi

What is the best way to stop/abort/cancel a running workflow.

We want to cancel a workflow in a cooperative way. Meaning the workflow will be notified that it is canceled. If it is waiting it should be interrupted. 

Currently we could not find any API to stop a running workflow in any way.

Thank you

[Howie T]

I believe if it's currently running(meaning not in wait state) it's not copper's job to stop/abort/cancel your workflow. You should try throw a remote exception to your adapter in your working thread, and catch inside copper workflow.

If workflow is in wait state you could do something like this: 

try {

// everything else

} catch (WorkflowTerminationException te) {

// handler for your termination 

} catch (WorkfowCancelException ce){

//handler for your cancel exception

} catch (Exception e) {

//all other unknown exception

} finally {

//clean up

}

Cheers,

Howie

[Howie T]

I think I should add to this answer, in wait state, the workflow should be waiting for a notification, the exceptions (i.e. WorkflowCancelException) should be raised by your notification receivers, and by message from external/internal system.

[Michael Austermann]

I agree with Howie (as mostly :-))

In addition to his suggestion, here is what I would do to stop a workflow that is waiting:

You know, with copper it is also possible to wait for more than one response/event.

So, assume there is a workflow instance with ID X which is waiting for a response with correlationId C

I would do the wait like this

wait(WaitMode.FIRST, <sometimeout>, X, C);

Response rX = getAndRemoveResponse(X);

Response rC = getAndRemoveResponse(C);

if (rC != null) {

  // everything is fine - process the response and continue;

}

else if (rX != null) {

  // someone told us to abort

  throw new WorkflowCancelException(); // catch this somewhere as described below by Howie

}

So, you can easily abort the workflow instance with ID X, by just sending some response with CorrelationID X.

Hope this helps..

/Michael

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Von: "Howie" <cka...@gmail.com>
An: "COPPER Engine" <copper...@googlegroups.com>
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 27. Oktober 2016 05:44:09
Betreff: [COPPER Users] Re: Best Practice to Stop/Abort/Cancel a running workflow

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[Howie T]

Yeah, it depends on your preference, for me I wanted to move the error handling logic outside of my "generic workflow", but sure that's much simpler to directly code in your specific workflow :)

Basically, understand how to use wait(), getAndRemoveResponse(), getAndRemoveResponses() and engine.notify() is very crucial to the understanding of copper engine!