Temporal Design Patterns

Warning: This catalog is under active development. Content and structure may change.

Personal project by @taonic.

Temporal provides a set of durable execution primitives that you can compose into common, reusable, and proven patterns. Having these patterns in your toolbox helps you solve recurring problems in a battle-tested way.

Distributed transaction patterns

Saga Pattern

Manages distributed transactions with compensating actions. Each step has a compensation that undoes its effects if subsequent steps fail.

Early Return

Synchronous initialization with asynchronous completion. Returns results immediately while processing continues in the background.

Entity & lifecycle patterns

Entity Workflow

Models long-lived business entities as individual Workflows that persist for the entity's entire lifetime, handling all state transitions through Signals and Updates.

Continue-As-New

Prevents unbounded history growth by completing the current execution and starting a new one with fresh history.

Updatable Timer

Dynamically adjustable timers that respond to Signals or Updates. Extend, shorten, or cancel timers based on external events.

Workflow messaging patterns

Signal with Start

Starts a Workflow when Signaling it if it does not already exist. If already running, it receives the Signal directly.

Request-Response via Updates

Synchronous request-response with validation. Updates modify state and return results directly.

Task orchestration patterns

Child Workflows

Decomposes complex Workflows into smaller, reusable units. Each child has an independent Workflow ID, history, and lifecycle.

Parallel Execution

Executes multiple Activities concurrently for maximum throughput with error handling and controlled parallelism.

Pick First (Race)

Starts multiple Activities in parallel and uses the first result, cancelling the rest.

External interaction patterns

Polling External Services

Strategies for polling external resources with varying frequencies: frequent, infrequent, and periodic patterns.

Long-Running Activity

Long-running Activities report progress via heartbeats and enable resumption after failures with cancellation support.

Approval

Human-in-the-loop Workflows that block until external approval decisions are made. Uses Signals to capture approval data with metadata.

Delayed Start

Creates Workflows immediately but defers execution until a specified delay expires. Fits one-time scheduled operations and grace periods.

Worker configuration patterns

Worker-Specific Task Queues

Routes Activities to specific Workers using unique Task Queues for Worker affinity and host-specific processing.

Activity Dependency Injection

Injects external dependencies into Activities at Worker startup, keeping Workflow code deterministic and Activities testable.