Workflows

A Workflow consists of Tasks, organized with Task Rules to describe how they should run. The Workflow and Tasks are defined in a Python script which just acts as a configuration file specifying the Workflow’s structure as code.

Declaring Workflows

A Workflow is declared in a with statement, which includes all Tasks and Task Rules inside it.

from ai_flow.model.workflow import Workflow
from ai_flow.operators.bash import BashOperator

with Workflow(name='workflow_name') as workflow:
    task1 = BashOperator(name='task_1',
                         bash_command='echo I am the 1st task')
    task2 = BashOperator(name='task_2',
                         bash_command='echo I am the 2nd task')
    task2.start_after([task1, ])

AIFlow will execute the Python file and then load any Workflow objects at the top level in the file. This means you can define multiple Workflows per Python file.

Uploading Workflows

Users can upload Workflows by the command-line interface. In addition to the Python file containing the Workflow objects, other files that are used in Workflow definition and execution should also be uploaded by --files option.

aiflow workflow upload workflow.py --files f1,f2

Running Workflows

A Workflow can be executed to generate Workflow Execution. There are 3 ways to run Workflow and [generate workflow executions](./workflow_executions.md#Creating Workflow Execution).

Workflow disabling and deletion

A Workflow can be disabled which means no more Workflow Executions or [Task Executions](./tasks.md#Task Executions) will be scheduled.

aiflow workflow disable workflow_name

However, the disabling operation does not delete the metadata of the Workflow, users can enable the Workflow to resume the scheduling of it if needed.

aiflow workflow enable workflow_name

If you want to not only disable the workflow but also delete the metadata, please run the following command:

aiflow workflow delete workflow name

Note

The deletion command truncates all metadata of the Workflow in cascade, including Workflows, Workflow Executions and Task Executions, so before deleting the Workflow, please make sure that no executions of the Workflow is still running.