I know I can get the actual time the flow was entered with

prefect.context.get_run_context().start_time

, but that seems a little dangerous if the run is late; I'd rather pull the scheduled time if possible

Hi Andy; if you put your deployment on a schedule, then the parameters will end up being either their default values or the values you set as default on the deployment. You can use

prefect.runtime

to access contextual information such as scheduled start time, so here's the pattern I recommend:

@flow
def my_flow(x: datetime = None):
    if x is None:
        x = prefect.runtime.flow_run.scheduled_start_time

ahhhh ok. I had found

ctx = prefect.context.get_run_context()
ctx.flow_run.expected_start_time

but yours seems cleaner, thanks

scheduled start time is exactly equivalent to your example (https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/blob/main/src/prefect/runtime/flow_run.py#L125)

you are right, my mistake. I was comparing an auto-scheduled run to a manually triggered one.

no worries!

@Chris White, should I expect

prefect.cli.deployment.pause_schedule(prefect.runtime.deployment.name)

to pause the deployment associated with that flow run? I'm not sure how to call this correctly, but this had seemed to be the way