If I want my flow to run a series of tasks in an exact order ignoring data dependencies, is there an easier way to do that other than manually adding an edge between all the tasks?

Hi @Michael Reeves - you can manually set upstream dependencies (independent of data dependencies) with the

upstream_tasks

kwarg, which accepts an array of tasks, like this:

my_task(upstream_tasks=[my_upstream_task])

I did that and it still ran twice due to being downstream of a parameter task

Ah, usually what's going on there is you're passing independent references to the task, which is telling Prefect you want that task to run in two separate instances. To explicitly tell Prefect to use a single instance of a task, instantiate it independently and pass in that reference like this:

my_upstream_task_ref = my_upstream_task()

task_1(upstream_tasks=[my_upstream_task_ref])
task_2(upstream_tasks=[my_upstream_task_ref])

AH thats it! thanks!

😄

gosh that was very frustrating, but that makes so much sense now, I was passing in references to the original tasks not the instantiated tasks

Sorry about that! It's easy to forget that this is normal Python sometimes since it's doing such cool things 💪

well I'm also a c programmer so should have thought of this as the first issue lolol