📄️ Signals
Signals allow you to trigger events in a workflow from outside the workflow. This can be useful for reacting to external events, enabling human-in-the-loop interventions, or for signaling the completion of an external task.
📄️ Queries
Queries allow you to retrieve information about the current state of a workflow without affecting its execution. This is useful for monitoring and debugging purposes.
📄️ Timers
Laravel Workflow provides the ability to suspend the execution of a workflow and resume at a later time. These are durable timers, meaning they survive restarts and failures while remaining consistent with workflow replay semantics. This can be useful for implementing delays, retry logic, or timeouts.
📄️ Signal + Timer
In some cases, you may want to wait for a signal or for a timer to expire, whichever comes first. This can be achieved by using awaitWithTimeout($timeout, $condition).
📄️ Heartbeats
Heartbeats are sent at regular intervals to indicate that an activity is still running and hasn't frozen or crashed. They prevent the activity from being terminated due to timing out. This enables long-running activities to have a relatively low timeout. As long as the activity sends a heartbeat faster than the timeout duration, it will not be terminated.
📄️ Side Effects
A side effect is a closure containing non-deterministic code. The closure is only executed once and the result is saved. It will not execute again if the workflow is retried. Instead, it will return the saved result. This makes the workflow deterministic because replaying the workflow will always return the same stored value rather than re-running the non-deterministic code.
📄️ Child Workflows
It's often necessary to break down complex processes into smaller, more manageable units. Child workflows provide a way to encapsulate a sub-process within a parent workflow. This allows you to create hierarchical and modular structures for your workflows, making them more organized and maintainable.
📄️ Concurrency
Activities can be executed in series or in parallel. In either case, you start by using activity() to create a new instance of an activity and return a promise that represents the execution of that activity. The activity will immediately begin executing in the background. You can then yield this promise to pause the execution of the workflow and wait for the result of the activity, or pass the promise into the all() method to wait for a group of activities to complete in parallel.
📄️ Sagas
Sagas are an established design pattern for managing complex, long-running operations:
📄️ Events
In Laravel Workflow, events are dispatched at various stages of workflow and activity execution to notify of progress, completion, or failures. These events can be used for logging, metrics collection, or any custom application logic.
📄️ Webhooks
Laravel Workflow provides webhooks that allow external systems to start workflows and send signals dynamically. This feature enables seamless integration with external services, APIs, and automation tools.
📄️ Continue As New
Laravel Workflow supports the Continue As New pattern, allowing a running workflow to restart itself with new arguments.
📄️ Versioning
Since workflows can run for long periods, sometimes months or even years, it's common to need to make changes to a workflow definition while executions are still in progress. Without versioning, modifying workflow code that affects the execution path would cause non-determinism errors during replay.