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Distributed CRON

Try the Developer's guide

The majority of this information has moved into the Developer's guide.

However, if you can't find what you are looking for there, we recommend checking this doc set as well.

This is how you set a Cron Schedule in PHP:

  $workflow = $this->workflowClient->newWorkflowStub(
      CronWorkflowInterface::class,
      WorkflowOptions::new()
          ->withWorkflowId(CronWorkflowInterface::WORKFLOW_ID)
          ->withCronSchedule('* * * * *')
          // Execution timeout limits total time. Cron will stop executing after this timeout.
          ->withWorkflowExecutionTimeout(CarbonInterval::minutes(10))
          // Run timeout limits duration of a single workflow invocation.
          ->withWorkflowRunTimeout(CarbonInterval::minute(1))
  );

  $output->writeln("Starting <comment>CronWorkflow</comment>... ");

  try {
      $run = $this->workflowClient->start($workflow, 'Antony');
      // ...
  }

Setting withCronSchedule turns the Workflow Execution into a Temporal Cron Job

You can check our PHP samples for example code.

PHP SDK WorkflowOptions source code: https://github.com/temporalio/sdk-php/blob/master/src/Client/WorkflowOptions.php

Retrieve last successful result​

Sometimes it is useful to obtain the progress of previous successful runs. This is supported by two APIs in the PHP SDK: Workflow::hasLastCompletionResult and Workflow::getLastCompletionResult. Below is an example of how to use this in PHP:

public function cronWorkflow() {
    $lastProcessedFileName = Workflow::getLastCompletionResult(Type::TYPE_STRING);

    // Process work starting from the lastProcessedFileName.
    // Business logic implementation goes here.
    // Updates lastProcessedFileName to the new value.

    return $lastProcessedFileName;
}

Note that this works even if one of the cron schedule runs failed. The next schedule will still get the last successful result if it ever successfully completed at least once. For example, for a daily cron Workflow, if the first day run succeeds and the second day fails, then the third day run will still get the result from first day's run using these APIs.