Skip to main content

Workflows: Cron Scheduling, Automatic Retry/Resume, and Alerts

Equipe Ontologie
Equipe Ontologie

Workflows are at the heart of automation in Ontologie. With this update, they become even more robust: cron scheduling for planned executions, automatic retry/resume on failure, cloning to duplicate your workflows, and alerts to notify you when something goes wrong.

Why Workflow Automation​

A workflow that runs manually is fine for testing. But in production, you need your workflows to:

  • Run automatically at regular intervals (every day at 8 AM, every Monday, the 1st of each month).
  • Recover on their own from transient errors (network timeouts, temporarily unavailable services).
  • Notify you when a problem requires human intervention.
  • Be duplicable so you can create variants without starting from scratch.

This is exactly what this update brings to the Workflow Builder.

What's New​

Cron Scheduling​

Schedule automatic execution of your workflows using standard cron expressions:

  • Cron expressions: the full power of cron syntax (0 8 * * 1-5 = every weekday at 8 AM).
  • Visual editor: a visual editor translates the cron expression into plain language ("Every weekday at 08:00").
  • Time zones: configure the time zone for your schedule (Europe/Paris by default).
  • Overlap protection: if an execution is still running when the next one is scheduled, it is queued instead of starting in parallel.

Common schedule examples:

ExpressionDescription
0 8 * * *Every day at 8 AM
0 8 * * 1-5Every weekday at 8 AM
0 0 1 * *The 1st of each month at midnight
*/15 * * * *Every 15 minutes
0 9 * * 1Every Monday at 9 AM

Practical example: you create a "Weekly Data Quality Report" workflow and schedule it every Monday at 9 AM. The workflow runs automatically, generates the report, and sends an email to the team.

Automatic Retry and Resume​

Workflows in production inevitably encounter errors: an external service is temporarily unavailable, a network timeout, an exceeded API quota. Instead of failing permanently, workflows can now recover automatically.

Retry:

  • Configure the number of attempts (1 to 5) and the delay between each attempt.
  • The delay can be fixed (30 seconds) or exponential (30s, 60s, 120s, 240s).
  • Each attempt is logged in the execution history.

Resume:

  • If a workflow fails after all retry attempts, it pauses at the point of failure.
  • You can fix the issue (e.g., renew an API token) and resume execution right where it left off.
  • No need to re-run the steps that already completed — the workflow resumes exactly at the block that failed.

Practical example: your data import workflow fails due to a timeout on an external API. The system retries 3 times with exponential backoff. If the API is still unavailable, the workflow pauses. An hour later, the API is back — you click "Resume" and the workflow continues where it left off.

Workflow Cloning​

Duplicate an existing workflow in a single click:

  • Full copy: all blocks, connections, configurations, and variables are duplicated.
  • Automatic renaming: the clone is named "My workflow (copy)" — rename it as needed.
  • Independence: the clone is completely independent from the original. Changes to one do not affect the other.
  • Use cases: create variants (test vs. production), duplicate for another workspace, back up before modifying.

Practical example: you have an "Import Clients France" workflow that works well. You clone it and modify the clone to create "Import Clients Belgium" by changing only the filtering parameters.

Alerts​

Get notified when a workflow needs your attention:

  • Execution failure: receive an alert when a workflow fails (after all retry attempts).
  • Long-running execution: receive an alert when a workflow exceeds a configurable duration.
  • Notification channels: email, webhook, or in-app notification.
  • Filtering rules: configure which workflows trigger alerts and who receives them.

Practical example: you set up an alert on your "Daily Sync" workflow: if the execution fails or exceeds 10 minutes, an email is sent to the operations team.

In-Flight Cancellation​

New control over running workflows:

  • Clean cancellation: stop a running workflow without corrupting data.
  • "Cancelled" state: the workflow is marked as cancelled in the history, distinct from a failure.
  • Cleanup: allocated resources (temporary files, connections) are released cleanly.

Getting Started​

  1. Open the Workflow Builder and select an existing workflow.
  2. Configure the schedule in the "Scheduling" tab: choose a cron expression or use the visual editor.
  3. Configure retry in the advanced settings of each sensitive block.
  4. Enable alerts in the "Alerts" tab of the workflow.
  5. Test by running the workflow manually, then let the schedule take over.

Scheduling is available for all workflows. Alerts are configured per workflow in the advanced settings.

Next Steps​