Worker SDK

Worker SDK makes it easy to write Conductor workers which are strongly typed with specific inputs and outputs.

Annotations for the worker methods:

@WorkerTask - When annotated, convert a method to a Conductor worker.
@InputParam - Name of the input parameter to bind to from the task's input.
@OutputParam - Name of the output key of the task's output.

Please note inputs and outputs to a task in Conductor are JSON documents.

Examples

Create a worker named task1 that gets Task as input and produces TaskResult as output.

@WorkerTask("task1")
    public TaskResult task1(Task task) {
        task.setStatus(Task.Status.COMPLETED);
        return new TaskResult(task);
    }

Create a worker named task2 that takes the name as a String input and produces an output return "Hello, " + name

@WorkerTask("task2")
public @OutputParam("greetings") String task2(@InputParam("name") String name) {
    return "Hello, " + name;
}

Example Task Input/Output

Input:

{
   "name": "conductor"
}

Output:

{
   "greetings": "Hello, conductor"
}

A worker that takes complex java type as input and produces the complex output:

@WorkerTask("get_insurance_quote")
 public InsuranceQuote getInsuranceQuote(GetInsuranceQuote quoteInput) {
     InsuranceQuote quote = new InsuranceQuote();
     //Implementation
     return quote;
 }

Example Task Input/Output

Input:

{
   "name": "personA",
   "zipCode": "10121",
   "amount": 1000000
}

Output:

{
   "name": "personA",
   "quotedPremium": 123.50,
   "quotedAmount": 1000000
}

Managing Task Workers

Annotated Workers are managed by WorkflowExecutor

Start Workers

WorkflowExecutor executor = new WorkflowExecutor("http://server/api/");
//List of packages  (comma separated) to scan for annotated workers.  
// Please note, the worker method MUST be public and the class in which they are defined
//MUST have a no-args constructor        
executor.initWorkers("com.company.package1,com.company.package2");

Stop Workers

The code fragment to stop workers at shutdown of the application.

executor.shutdown();

Unit Testing Workers

Workers implemented with the annotations are regular Java methods that can be unit tested with any testing framework.

Mock Workers for Workflow Testing

Create a mock worker in a different package (e.g., test) and scan for these packages when loading up the workers for integration testing.

See Unit Testing Framework for more details on testing.

Best Practices

In a typical production environment, you will have multiple workers across different machines/VMs/pods polling for the same task. As with all Conductor workers, the following best practices apply:

Workers should be stateless and should not maintain any state on the process they are running.
Ideally, workers should be idempotent.
The worker should follow the Single Responsibility Principle and do exactly one thing they are responsible for.
The worker should not embed any workflow logic - i.e., scheduling another worker, sending a message, etc. The Conductor has features to do this, making it possible to decouple your workflow logic from worker implementation.

Worker SDK

Managing Task Workers​

Start Workers​

Stop Workers​

Unit Testing Workers​

Mock Workers for Workflow Testing​​

Best Practices​