Hi. I'm just starting to look at Prefect 2.0. Is there a suggested way of handling a waiting period mid flow? For example if I start a flow, and after an initial task I want to wait for 5 minutes before continuing, do I just sleep for 5 minutes in a task? What about if I wanted to wait for days?

You could do that with a sleep yeah. What is the use case for waiting days? Because maybe at that point to can trigger a sub flow scheduled for a later time

In some cases we would detect an alarm, then start gathering data, days later we'd check if the gathered data met certain criteria before continuing with tasks. So are you saying I could dynamically schedule a follow up flow to check on my gathered data?

Ah I guess not yet. We do have

Client.create_flow_run_from_deployment

here but I guess it doesn’t take in a scheduled start time yet. The equivalent in Prefect 1 does

Hmm, can you suggest a way to do this? or will it be coming as 2.0 comes out of beta?

it will be coming, for now though you’d either need to poll or use Prefect 1.0. I did leave an internal message to confirm and i’ll get back to you

Thanks, I appreciate it!

Or maybe I was wondering if you could set up a scheduled deployment every hour to check if there’s new data; if not, stop the flow run prematurely and recheck in another hour? to prevent clobbering, could also set concurrency limit = 1 https://orion-docs.prefect.io/concepts/schedules/

I think at that point, you can just use the task level retry to achieve it can it will be simpler

It could be possible to setup a schedule to check if any jobs are complete, but we could potentially have a hundreds of different flows so we'd have to plan it out well. I was hoping prefect would have something built in to handle it.

Not exactly the same issue, but this is heavily related. Definitely in the list of things to do for Prefect 2.0

This is great. Is there an estimate as to when you're going to leave beta?

No public timeline for that yet

Thanks

Of course! Prefect 1.0 can handle this for sure though if you want to give that a try