How to spawn a Workflow Execution in Go

To spawn a Workflow Execution, use the ExecuteWorkflow() method on the Go SDK Client.

The ExecuteWorkflow() API call requires an instance of context.Context, an instance of StartWorkflowOptions, a Workflow Type name, and all variables to be passed to the Workflow Execution. The ExecuteWorkflow() call returns a Future, which can be used to get the result of the Workflow Execution.

package main

import (
  // ...

  "go.temporal.io/sdk/client"
)

func main() {
  temporalClient, err := client.Dial(client.Options{})
  if err != nil {
    // ...
  }
  defer temporalClient.Close()
  // ...
  workflowOptions := client.StartWorkflowOptions{
    // ...
  }
  workflowRun, err := temporalClient.ExecuteWorkflow(context.Background(), workflowOptions, YourWorkflowDefinition, param)
  if err != nil {
    // ...
  }
  // ...
}

func YourWorkflowDefinition(ctx workflow.Context, param YourWorkflowParam) (YourWorkflowResponse, error) {
  // ...
}

If the invocation process has access to the function directly, then the Workflow Type name parameter can be passed as if the function name were a variable, without quotations.

workflowRun, err := temporalClient.ExecuteWorkflow(context.Background(), workflowOptions, YourWorkflowDefinition, param)

If the invocation process does not have direct access to the statically defined Workflow Definition, for example, if the Workflow Definition is in an un-importable package, or it is written in a completely different language, then the Workflow Type can be provided as a string.

workflowRun, err := c.ExecuteWorkflow(context.Background(), workflowOptions, "YourWorkflowDefinition", param)