Advanced Resource Management

Workflows often interact with external resources such as database connections, API clients, or file handles. Proper management of these resources—acquiring them when needed and releasing them promptly—is crucial for efficiency and stability, especially in long-running or high-concurrency scenarios. IdentityFlow’s flow.use() provides a basic pattern for lazy-loaded, cached resources. For more explicit control, you can use try...finally blocks.

Example: Explicit Acquire and Release

This pattern is useful when a resource needs to be explicitly acquired at the start of a specific operation and guaranteed to be released even if errors occur.

// Assume these are functions to manage a hypothetical external resource
// async function acquireResource(): Promise<ResourceType> { ... }
// async function useResource(resource: ResourceType, params: any): Promise<any> { ... }
// async function releaseResource(resource: ResourceType): Promise<void> { ... }

export default defineWorkflow('resource-management-explicit', async (flow) => {
  let resource;
  try {
    resource = await flow.do('acquire resource', async () => {
      return acquireResource();
    });

    await flow.do('use resource', async () => {
      // Perform operations using the acquired resource
      return useResource(resource, flow.params.data);
    });

    // ... more steps using the resource
  } catch (error) {
    flow.error('Error during resource usage', { error: error.message });
    // Depending on the error, you might re-throw or handle it
    throw error;
  } finally {
    // Ensure the resource is released even if errors occurred in the try block
    if (resource) {
      await flow.do('release resource', async () => {
        return releaseResource(resource);
      });
    }
  }

  return { status: 'Resource operations completed' };
});

Key Considerations for Resource Management:

Lazy Loading with flow.use(): For resources that can be initialized once and reused throughout the workflow (or parts of it), flow.use() is often the preferred method due to its simplicity and automatic caching. (Refer to the Simple API feature page for flow.use() examples).
Explicit Control: Use try...finally for resources that have a well-defined lifecycle within a specific part of the workflow and must be cleaned up.
Idempotent Release: Ensure that release operations are idempotent (can be safely called multiple times) if there’s any chance of them being invoked more than once during error recovery or retries.
Connection Pooling: For database connections or similar resources, leverage connection pooling mechanisms provided by client libraries rather than acquiring/releasing connections for every single operation. See Integrations for client configuration examples.
Timeouts: Implement timeouts for acquiring or using resources to prevent workflows from hanging indefinitely.

Effective resource management is key to building robust and performant workflows.

Review Parallel Processing techniques.