january 20, 2020

Read the full product announcement

Guidelines

• Writing workflows in PHP, Python, and Ruby is now deprecated, as well as the corresponding SDKs. NodeJS is the only officially supported language for writing workflows.
• Actions (formerly tasks) inside your web application should be triggered from a workflow task inside your Zenaton project by http call, grpc, queues, etc.
• Workflows should be written in a dedicated Zenaton project, separated from the main application.
• Your Zenaton project can be hosted independently (i.e. Heroku or CleverCloud) for easier deployment, or on the servers/hosting solution of your choice to have complete control.

NodeJS SDK

• New helpers have been added to avoid having to create tasks to manage workflows, debug, and do non-idempotent things by definition - such as getting the current date and time, or using random numbers:

  • this.log() to do console.log() inside a workflow.

  • this.random() to get a random float using Math.random() inside a workflow.

  • this.date() to get a Date object representing the current time inside a workflow.

  • this.send() to send an event to the current workflow.

  • this.terminate() to terminate the current workflow. Please note that the workflow will appear as terminated and will displayed as a black progress bar, whereas a simple return in the workflow have the same effect but the workflow appears as completed with a green progress bar. You can use this.terminate() if you want to quickly being able to distinguish a workflow that was interrupted early in the monitoring.

  • this.pause() to pause the current workflow.

  • this.select to begin a selection of workflows as the target of an action.

    • this.select.workflow().withId() will target a specific workflow by its identifier.
    • this.select.workflow("PaymentWorkflow").withTag("order:1234") will target workflows named PaymentWorkflows and having the tag order:1234 associated to them.
    • this.select.workflow("PaymentWorkflow") will target all workflows named "PaymentWorkflow".
    • Actions are specified by a method call on the selectors. Possible actions are:
      • .send() : Send an event to workflows matching the selector. Example: this.select.workflow().withId("78cb6908-e8f3-4e21-b546-35d5e9fda15e").send("PaymentRejected", "CARD_EXPIRED") will send event PaymentRejected to the workflow with identifier 78cb6908-e8f3-4e21-b546-35d5e9fda15e .
      • .terminate(): Terminate workflows matching the selector. Example: this.select.workflow("PaymentWorkflow").terminate() will terminate all PaymentWorkflow workflows.
      • .pause() : Pause workflows matching the selector. Same usage than .terminate().
      • .resume(): Resume workflows matching the selector. Same usage than .terminate().
    • Selectors are also available from outside a workflow by using the select function from Client object. Usage in the same as described above. Example:

    const { Client } = require("zenaton");
    const zenaton = new Client("<app id>", "<api token>", "<app env>");
    zenaton.select.workflow("PaymentWorkflow").terminate();
    

• Connectors are now deprecated in favor of a direct usage of 3rd party APIs and SDKs.

  • For 3rd parties providing a NodeJS SDK, you can add it as a dependency of your Zenaton project and use it inside a workflow task.
  • For any other 3rd parties providing an HTTP API, you can use Axios or any other HTTP client to make a request to the API from a task.

GraphQL API

• Our GraphQL API is now available to everyone. You can read the documentation here. The following operations are available, using any HTTP client:
  • Dispatch tasks and workflows
  • Send events to workflows
  • Pause, Resume, and Terminate workflows
  • Create task and workflow schedules

Sandbox

• You can now define and use workflow tasks when running workflows in the sandbox.

Documentation

• All of our documentation has been reworked and redesigned. Everything is now up to date, we have added more content to help you get started and more examples on how to use our new features and more use cases to inspire you. You can find it here: https://docs.zenaton.com/
• Our old documentation is still available at https://zenaton.com/documentation/.