What steps can I take to make a worfklow activity resilient to exceptions - workflow-foundation-4

Question

I am very new to Workflow Foundation development, and am worried that I am opening serious holes in our business process handling by not properly handling application / database exceptions in custom activities.
I would appreciate some steps that I could take to add this resiliency to my custom activities so that I can easily use the designer and other tools to ensure that, as far as I can, I do not create custom activities that are brittle and likely to cause workflow cleanup issues.

Answer 1

Here are some options, at different execution stages, that are available for you to use to handle exceptions.
First option (at activity/workflow execution time):
First of all, on custom activities, you should always try to treat exceptions inside it's execution. Some activities might not work but the overall workflow can continue and, in such cases, log the error to persistence and even show the user that something didn't work as expected but the thing will continue are good options.
That being said there'll always be cases where an activity have to (and even should) thrown exceptions and those should be treated at workflow level. Something like: if this exception occurs on this activity, do this, otherwise, do that.
Lets imagine you've a custom activity which persists something to DB:
public sealed PersistIntegerToDb : CodeActivity
{
public InArgument<int> ValueToPersist { get; set; }
protected override void Execute(CodeActivityMetadata metadata)
{
try
{
// persist
}
catch(SqlException exception)
{
// re throws the SqlException
throw new SqlException("'ValueToPersist' wasn't persisted.", exception);
}
}
}
Then, in your code or through designer you've available TryCatch activity to catch that error and treat it the way you want:
var workflow = new TryCatch
{
Try = new PersistIntegerToDb
{
ValueToPersist = 10
},
Catches =
{
new Catch<SqlException>
{
Action = new ActivityAction<SqlException>
{
Handler = new WriteLine
{
Text = "An error occurred and the value wasn't saved! Anyway workflow will continue..."
}
}
}
}
}
Or you can terminate it using TerminateWorkflow.
Second option (at design time):
Ok, but you can argue that client doesn't know that he have to handle those cases. In that case, and this is an usability option you might consider, instead of making available PersistIntegerToDb on the designer, you can provide an activity already surrounded by exceptions catches to handle, through IActivityTemplateFactory:
public sealed PersistIntegerToDbFactory : IActivityTemplateFactory
{
public Activity Create(DependencyObject target)
{
return new TryCatch
{
Try = new PersistIntegerToDb
{
ValueToPersist = 10
},
Catches =
{
new Catch<SqlException>
{
}
}
};
}
}
Now you just add PersistIntegerToDbFactoryas if it were a regular activity:
new ToolboxItemWrapper(typeof(PersistIntegerToDbFactory), null, "Persist Integer");
Third option (at validation time):
Never forget to validate workflow before execution!
var validationResults =
ActivityValidationServices.Validate(workflow);
foreach(var error in validationResults.Errors)
{
Console.WriteLine(string.Format(
"Validation error '{0}', generated on activity '{1}' in the property named {2}",
error.Message,
error.Source.DisplayName,
error.PropertyName));
}
Fourth option (at application execution time):
You can handle all not treated exception that might happen during execution, using OnUnhandledException event:
var wfApp = new WorkflowApplication(activity);
wfApp.OnUnhandledException +=
delegate(WorkflowApplicationUnhandledExceptionEventArgs e)
{
if (e.UnhandledException is SqlException)
{
Console.WriteLine("Some data wasn't properly persited.");
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("Unknown error: " + e.UnhandledException.GetType());
Console.WriteLine("With message: " + e.UnhandledException.Message);
}
Console.WriteLine("Ok, workflow will be abort");
return UnhandledExceptionAction.Abort;
};
Note that, at this stage, you can only Abort, Cancel and Terminate the workflow and that's the reason why you should 1) avoid throwing exceptions or 2) treat exceptions inside your workflow. OnUnhandledException is your last chance to end the workflow execution gracefully and should always be treated even if for logging purposes. Something like DivideByZeroExceptions can occur and are almost impossible to predict and catch at validation time, for example.

Answer 2

As far as custom activities goes you should treat them as any other piece of code. Handle the errors you can and let you can't handle the rest bubble up.
At the workflow level you can use the TryCatch activity and workflow persistence to deal with errors. Specially persistence is something people overlook often. Add Persist activities at appropriate steps in your workflow and set the workflow to abort on unhandled errors. Now you can go back in and reload the last good workflow state and retry the actions that cause an unhandled exception. A great way of recovering from failures with resources like databases that might be unavailable for some reason and then come back.