Run Flow

Description

This job triggers a flow in Portable using this endpoint.

Use Cases

We recommend creating a Run flow task for each flow in Portable.

This way, you can use Orchestra to trigger your data ingestion on a manual or event based schedule. This has a number of advantages vs. using Portable's in-built scheduler:

• You can coordinate tasks outside of Portable, like other ingestion tools for connectors Portable doesn't support, using Orchestra

• You can coordinate multiple flows in Portable to occur at the same time. By creating the tasks in parallel in Orchestra you will only need to change the schedule in one place instead of modifying the schedule of each flow individually in portable.

• When Portable flows run, Data Warehouse cost is incurred. Running these operations on a schedule you set explicitly ensures these costs do not go out of hand

• We aggregate metadata from the Portable Task in the same place as the metadata from other operations in your Pipeline

Parameters

These parameters are required to run the Run Flow task

Name	Data type	Restrictions	Example
Flow ID	String	N.A.	12345689

Error handling

Already running flow

In Portable a flow is either running or not. Flows do not have individual runs. Therefore Orchestra will check the status of a flow before requesting a new run of the flow. If the flow is already running Orchestra fails the task to alert you that it is already running. See here for more details about why this is, along with potential remedies.

API Requests

If we receive the following error codes from Portable, we'll raise an error and the task will move to a failed state.

Code	Description	Handling
401	Unauthorised. Occurs if your API Key is wrong	Fail the task and alert
404	Not Found. Occurs when your flow ID is wrong.	Fail the task and alert
500	Unknown error within Portable.	Fail the task and alert. A task receiving this status code alerts the team at Orchestra to go investigate and raise and issue with the Portable team if appropriate.