I'm having some trouble with prefect Context. According to the docs, I can use context for time sensitive tasks and backfills (https://docs.prefect.io/core/faq.html#does-prefect-support-backfills). However, I've had a number of problems with this approach. I can't supply a datetime to the context of a flow which is run on a schedule, as that datetime is never recalculated after the initialisation of the flow run. And I can't seem to overwrite the default time values in the prefect context as described here: https://docs.prefect.io/core/concepts/execution.html#context Finally, a weird thing is that the date values (such as prefect.context.today) seems to be a strings, while the datetime values (such as prefect.context.date) are datetime objects. Am I doing anything wrong? I'm on Prefect 0.9.8 In the meantime, I'm going to look at using parameters instead of context.

Hi @Ogaday - any backfill run will need to be run off schedule. If you are using Core alone, you can call

flow.run(run_on_schedule=False)

with whatever context information you want to pass. In general, mixing ad-hoc runs with scheduled runs is a better experience when you use the Prefect API (either the newly open sourced prefect server, which requires 0.10.0+, or Prefect Cloud). And you are correct - some values of context are datetimes and others are strings; this is to support certain values and types that Airflow users would expect. The full list can be found here: https://docs.prefect.io/api/latest/utilities/context.html

Thanks @Chris White - the main problem I'm having is that I can't overwrite the default context, so I can't see how to run a backfill. In the example above, I'd expect the pipeline to print

foo

and

hello

but it prints a timestamp and the date.

Oh I see! Yes in this case you’ll want to pass context as follows:

flow.run(context=dict(date='foo', my_date=datetime.utcnow(), today='hello'))

Let me know if that does the trick

Thanks @Chris White that works perfectly. In that case it looks like the right thing to do is to use the default context items and overwrite them when I want to run the flow off schedule, like the docs/you suggest. I'll also look into the open source Prefect Orchestrator - haven't had a chance since it was announced last week, but it's super exciting news and I'm keen to get to grips with it!

Awesome! Let us know if you have any more questions, always happy to help