best-practices.md

Best practices when creating a workflow

A workflow should be developed in accordance with the guidelines outlined in the Serverless Workflow definitions documentation.

This document provides a summary of several additional rules and recommendations to ensure smooth integration with other applications, such as the Backstage Orchestrator UI.

Workflow output schema

To effectively display the results of the workflow and any optional outputs generated by the user interface, or to facilitate the chaining of workflow executions, it is important for a workflow to deliver its output data in a recognized structured format as defined by the WorkflowResult schema.

The output meant for next processing should be placed under data.result property.

id: my-workflow
version: "1.0"
specVersion: "0.8"
name: My Workflow
start: ImmediatelyEnd
extensions:
  - extensionid: workflow-output-schema
    outputSchema: schemas/workflow-output-schema.json
states:
  - name: ImmediatelyEnd
     type: inject
     data:
       result:
          completedWith: success
          message: A human-readable description of the successful status. Or an error.
          outputs:
            - key: Foo Bar human readable name which will be shown in the UI
              value: Example string value produced on the output. This might be an input for a next workflow.
          nextWorkflows:
            - id: my-next-workflow-id
              name: Next workflow name suggested if this is an assessment workflow. Human readable, it's text does not need to match true workflow name.
    end: true

Then the schemas/workflow-output-schema.json can look like (referencing the WorkflowResult schema):

{
    "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-07/schema#",
    "title": "WorkflowResult",
    "description": "Schema of workflow output",
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "result": {
            "$ref": "shared/schemas/workflow-result-schema.json",
            "type": "object"
        }
    }
}

---