Hey Everyone! Does somebody know if we can

.submit

a task and use one of the parameters as the task name? I know we can currently do

my_task.submit(name="My Task")

and this will show up as

my_task-a1b2c3-0

in the UI, but what I would like to do is:

from prefect import flow, task

@flow(name="My Flow")
def my_flow():
    my_task("Hello")
    my_task(name="World")

@task(name_from_param="name")
def my_task(name):
    pass

Then in the Prefect UI I will see:

Running Flow: My Flow
Running Task: Hello-a1b2c3-0
Running Task: World-a1b2c3-1

A bit of background for context, we run all of our tasks either using AWS Lambda or DBT. For Lambda, I’ve built a central function (which is decorated as a task) with a signature

run_lambda(lambda_name, payload={})

, and most users are using it like

run_lambda.submit("MyLambdaFunction")

but then in the logs all the task names are

run_lambda-[ascii]-0

which is annoying when things go pop, as you have to click into the task run where I have added

<http://logger.info|logger.info>("Lambda name: %s", lambda_name)

for traceability. For all of my personal Flows I have the following convention

run_lambda.with_options(name="Lambda MyLambdaFunction").submit("MyLambdaFunction")

, which gives me the desired Prefect Task names in the UI, but getting everyone else to follow suit is another matter. I’ve attempted many solutions to dynamically name a task mainly focused on custom decorators, but they have all failed in one way or another… So I wanted to see if the Prefect community has any ideas or solutions! Thanks

This might be something you are looking for

It sounds like

with_options

does the job, but asking the team to run this one task differently than other tasks is the issue.

Hey @Khuyen Tran - Thanks for the link, I’m already using

.with_options

extensively myself, but I’m looking for an option to dynamically name a task using function parameters. I’ve taken a look at the source code of the

task

decorator: tasks.py#L158-L164, and I see that the name of the Task is defined before the function is called and thus before the function parameters are defined. Further exploring the source code, it looks like

enter_task_run_engine

is the central function that all Task invocations pass through: engine.py#L898. Feel like that around Line 897, there could be something like:

if task.name_from_param is not None:
    task.name = parameters.get(task.name_from_param, task.name)

@Fred Birchall I still try to understand what you mean by dynamically name a task using function parameters. Based on your provided example, wouldn’t doing this work?

@flow(name="My Flow")
def my_flow():
    task1.with_options(name="Hello")()
    task1.with_options(name="World")()

@Khuyen Tran Yes that example would work, but for my use case we have a library of functions that is available in all Prefect runtimes so that each developer does not have to re-invent the wheel with every flow. One such function looks like:

@task
def run_lambda(lambda_name, event={}):
   [...]

Most of our developers are not too experienced in Python so this library of tools also features as a way to abstract some of the complexities, like

.with_options

. So my ultimate goal is to allow our developers to run

run_lambda("MyFunction")

and the task in the UI to be called

MyFunction-a1b2c3-0

without our developers having to worry about the

.with_options

method.

You can’t currently create a custom name for a task without a

with_options

. You might consider open an issue on GitHub for this.

Reviving an old thread here, in Prefect 1.0, we can use this to achieve the above:

@task(task_run_name="{param1}")
def say_hello(param1: str) -> None:
    print(param1)

Is there no such feature in Prefect 2.0 yet?