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Workflow message passing - Temporal feature

Need to interact with your Workflow from outside of it? Think about use cases like these:

  • Your shipment-tracking Workflow needs to know when the item leaves the warehouse and is loaded into their truck. Signal your Workflow when the truck driver scans the barcode.
  • Folks in your company want to track the progress of their data migration Workflows. Query your running batch Workflow to get the data for the progress bar.
  • Your eCommerce shopping cart Workflow needs to know when a new item is added. Update it to add the item and receive back the current items to render.

Temporal provides Signals, Queries, and Updates to allow rich interactivity with your running Workflows.

Signals: Signal to send messages asynchronously to a running Workflow, changing its state or controlling its flow in real-time.

Queries: Query to check the progress of your Workflow or debug the internal state in real-time.

Updates: Update to send synchronous requests to your Workflow and track it in real-time.

To learn more about using these powerful primitives, see our encyclopedia Entry:

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For a deeper dive into Workflow message passing, enroll in one of our courses.

If you want to jump to straight to implementation details, see the SDK feature guides.

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