Stop workflow engine

[sfmskywalker]

It would be good to be able to stop the workflow engine, e.g. through a setting or even a single line of code. The challenge would be that there are various components like Quartz and Hangfire hosted services that keep on triggering workflow executions.

[senfgurke]

This would be a usefull feature and could cover the following use cases:

• the workfow system is part of an application with additional functionality and for maintanence reasons the workflow system shall not compute any data in this stage
• the workflow engine need to be stopped when some of the surrounding services (source/target) not available or in a maintenance mode to not produce inconsistent data. After the maintenance phase, the workflow system can be started
• Instead of disabling single workflows it cna be suitable to disable all workflows, espechially when they are connected to each other in a complex scene
• in the startup of the application which is hosting the workflow engine, an evaluation of the enviroment can prevent the workflow system of starting, but a user friendly UI can provide the issues of the enviroment --> when these are solved the workflow engine can be started

possible Implementation:

• the workflow controller is still running so that designer and workflow-definitions can be accessed, but the workflow controller provides a API to stop workflow executions.

[mohdali]

Great idea! In a previous product we had a control panel that allowed to control several sub services and stop them individually or stop all services.

That way for example we can have more fine tuned control to stop timer, http endpoints, service buses, etc. While still being able to interact with the workflow from designer API.

Just a recent example use case that we have: we created a custom activity that's malfunction and causing a memory leak, so we are forced to stop the engine. But we are then unable to view the history and see what went wrong. While we could have two different apps for the API and the engine, it is not really desirable.