Make it easier to manually trigger workflows

[Moortiii]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I'm coming from the world of Prefect, and am looking to switch to Temporal. During my evaluation I tried to manually trigger a workflow from the UI and was unimpressed with the experience. In order to trigger a workflow manually I need to know:

1. The name of the Task Queue
2. The name of the Workflow (which is confusingly named "Workflow Type" in the UI)
3. The expected Workflow schema

In Prefect there is a concept of a Deployment that simplify this process significantly. In practice it allows me to navigate to my known deployments and trigger a Workflow run quickly. This allows me to choose from Custom deployment or Quick run.

• Using Quick Run triggers a job with the default parameters, if any.
• Using Custom Run allows me to define the payload. The schema is populated automatically, based on the input parameters for the Flow Run.

In my organization we use this frequently to trigger Flow Runs on-demand for one-off jobs that shouldn't run on a defined schedule.

I'm adding some screenshots from Prefect for reference:

Listing known deployments:

Triggering a workflow:

Custom workflow run:

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally I would like to have a similar concept as Deployments in Prefect where I can define a combination of Workflow Type and Task Queue to trigger on demand.

I would also like to be able to choose from auto-discovered Workflows and Task Queues when manually starting a Workflow.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I tried to use Workflow version pinning to create a Workflow deployment, but this does not allow me to easily trigger a run of this workflow. I also tried asking on the Slack and was prompted to create an issue to track this feature.

Additional context

I notice that if I specify a non-existent Task Queue, that the UI highlights this for me - indicating that some backend querying is happening already.

[Alex-Tideman]

You can use the "Start Workflow Like This One" feature to prefill all the information on the Start Workflow screen to quickly change and start a workflow you've already run.

[Moortiii]

That's true! This does somewhat solve the issue in some settings, but feels less intuitive and doesn't work as well for local testing in ephemeral environments where there are no existing runs.

[jcran]

we use paused schedules to solve this problem btw. you can just create the job as a schedule with ScheduleState set to paused and then trigger as you need. We also use this same concept to prevent jobs from running automatically in non-prod environments. this is also nice since you can have diff default params saved as diff schedules but it's using the same workflow underneath. Heavy use of this concept creates other problems tho 😂

[Moortiii]

That's a clever solution @jcran. I'll check if this is something that could work for us as well!