Tasks Overview Page

Gugi · February 9, 2023, 9:30am

Purpose

This article explains what the Task page is and the things you can do on the page.
At a glance, you can filter out the tasks based on some filters.
Besides filtering, you can also do some actions to the tasks, such as checking a detail, skipping tasks, and retrying tasks.

Introduction

The Tasks page consists of a paginated list of tasks that are processed through the Alumio platform. A task commonly represents an entity that is being integrated from one system to another.
In order to make it easier for you to identify which tasks have been exported successfully, which ones failed, or which ones are in other phases, we give the tasks a status.

We recommend you read the topic Logic of Creating and Running a Task on this forum first to know how the basics of Alumio work. When you’ve read the topic, you will know the available task statuses.
Namely New, Finished, Failed, and Skipped.
There are two other statuses you should know, which are Processing and Retry. Please find the explanation of the statuses below.

New, means a task is ready to be processed
Processing, means a task is being processed
Finished, means a task has been processed and exported successfully
Failed, means a task has been processed but failed for a reason
Skipped, means a task has been skipped manually, or it has been processed previously but filtered by an entity (data) filter in an entity transformer of the outgoing configuration
Retry, means a task has been processed but matched the rules set on the route’s “Activate retrying of failed tasks” option. The task is going to be retried until it passes the number of attempted retries.
Rejected, is used in such cases as a limit of 1000 bytes for entity data has been configured and having tasks with invalid entity data. The reason why the task was rejected is displayed in the Import Logs on the Task detail page.

Filtering Out The List of Tasks

As you can see on the Task page, there are some filters available for you to filter out the tasks you don’t need to see or check. Below are the available filters.

Route, filters the tasks based on their route(s)
Status, filters the tasks based on their status(es)
Created at, filters the tasks based on a range of time when they were created
Updated at, filters the tasks based on a range of time when they were updated
Identifier, filters the tasks whose identifier matches the given string (contains or equals)
Entity Schema, filters the tasks whose entity identifier matches the given string (contains or equals)
Entity Identifier, filters the tasks whose entity identifier matches the given string (contains or equals)

Checking The Details of a Task

You can simply check the details of a task by clicking the task identifier.
There are four tabs, namely Overview, Entity Data, Import Messages, and Export Messages.

Overview, contains the overview information of the task, as you can also see on the task list
Entity Data, contains the entity data of the task as a result of subscribing and transforming (by transformers in the incoming configuration and route)
Import Messages, contains the messages logged through the process of subscribing and transforming (from the transformers in the incoming configuration and route)
Export Messages, contains the messages logged through the process of transforming (from the transformers in the outgoing configuration) and publishing.

It’s also possible to view logs on tasks that obtain different statuses:

for finished task an outgoing log “Finished task ” should be displayed in Logs (Import/Export messages tab);
for failed task “Failed task ” should be shown;
repaired tasks should have two new logs: one that says that the status is being repaired and one normal status log;
if the status is invalid, then an exception will be thrown.

To view details of the task, there are two ways to do that:

Use the Task Overview page > corresponding configuration > click on it > navigate to the Task Details page.
Use the Task Overview page > call the hamburger menu and then select the “View details” option. Then the overview popup expands to you with all the details and tabs which we have when navigating to the Task Details page. Besides that, you are able to redirect to the Route, Incoming and Outgoing configuration that belong to the selected configuration. By means of that, you don’t need to use the common path from selecting the configuration from the Overview and then go to the Details page.

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Note: Also you can filter logs for import and export from the “Import/Export messages” tabs to view logs according to the predefined timestamp.

Skipping Tasks Manually

Generally, we skip a task when we don’t want it to be processed by the outgoing configuration. When we run a route, the skipped tasks belonging to the route will not be processed. That was why we call the status Skipped.

As mentioned, a task can be skipped by skipping the tasks manually through the Task page. Below you’ll find the steps to skip tasks.

Go to the task page
(optional) Apply some filters if you need
Select the tasks you want to skip
- You can easily select all available tasks that match the filters by clicking the ▼ icon on the top left corner of the tasks list and checking the Select all available option
- Alternatively, you can also select all tasks on the current page by checking Select all on page option
Press the Skip X tasks button on the top of the page, which X refers to the number of tasks selected

Alternatively, you can skip a single task by clicking the action (three dots) icon on the Action column of the task, and choosing Skip. This way, you can only retry a task that has the status New.

Retrying Tasks Manually

There may be some events where we want to reprocess an entity to be exported again to the outgoing system.
The reason could be that the task status was Failed before, then we fixed the configuration and we want to retry the integration. Or, we may just need all entities to be reprocessed for some reason, even though they were Finished before.

Retrying tasks manually will set the status of the tasks to New again, so the route will process it to the outgoing system in the next run.
Below you’ll find the steps to retry tasks.

Go to the task page
(optional) Apply some filters if you need
Select the tasks you want to retry
- You can easily select all available tasks that match the filters by clicking the ▼ icon on the top left corner of the tasks list and checking the Select all available option
- Alternatively, you can also select all tasks on the current page by checking Select all on page option
Press the Retry X tasks button on the top of the page, which X refers to the number of tasks selected

Alternatively, you can retry a single task by clicking the action (three dots) icon on the Action column of the task, and choosing Retry. This way, you can only retry a task that has the status Finished, Failed, or Skipped.

Deleting tasks

You might think you need to delete a task.
This is however not possible in Alumio, luckily it’s not needed either.
If there is a task you’d like to not continue with, you can skip it instead.
By skipping the task it’ll never be executed and after a while be removed from your environment as the tasks go out of circulation.