Is it possible to suspend a flow such that it can be resumed with an RPC-call?

Question

I am trying to implement the following use-case in Corda: FlowA has been invoked on PartyA via startFlowDynamic. FlowA creates a partially signed transaction and invokes FlowB on PartyB via sendAndReceive. A human user shall now review and manually approve this transaction. Ideally FlowB should suspend after receiving the transaction. I would like to be able to query for suspended instances of FlowB via RPC, and present those (or rather some representation of the transaction therein) to the user in my UI. Then, after the user actions his approval, I would like to resume FlowB via RPC, which would then sign the transaction and return it to FlowA on PartyA.

I noticed that I can inspect suspended flows to some degree via CordaRPCOps.stateMachineAndUpdates and I read the tutorial on progress tracking, but it doesn't quite suffice for my case. I also read that interacting with people from flows is listed as a future feature, I just wondered if there isn't already some way to accomplish this ?

Answer 1

See the Negotiation Cordapp sample for an example of how this would work in practice here.

Corda doesn't currently support suspending a flow for user interaction.

However, you can support this kind of workflow as follows. Suppose you're writing a CorDapp for loan applications. You could have an initial flow that agrees the creation of a loanApplicationstate between two parties. From there, the approver can inspect the loan application, and either kick off an approve flow that creates a transaction to transform the loanApplication into an approvedLoan state, or kick off a reject flow to consume the loanApplication state without issuing an approvedLoan state.

Equally, you could add a status field to the loan state, specifying whether the loan is approved or not. Initially, the loan state would have the field set to unapproved. Then the approver could kick off one of two flows to update the loan state, to either have an approved or a rejected status.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if this is a "recommended approach" but I implemented a Quasar compatible AsynchListenableFuture in my flow as someone else had described here.

I needed to suspend a flow and wait for the production of a state from another flow (in response to a user interaction). It seems to work, but suspect it could be regarded as rather off-piste(?!).

Splitting the activities into atomic flows invoked directly by UI interaction is fine, but I needed a sort of "monitoring" flow to wait for an external (e.g. user) event before determining which sub flow to initiate next, and this needed to happen automatically and from within a flow already invoked prior to the the user interaction - the flow logic is then conditional on a state change which may arise from a user interaction or an incoming transaction from another node. In my case, this high level monitoring flow detects the consumption of a known state on the node, then invokes a subflow in response. The high level flow waits on the AsynchListenableFuture as described in the answer referenced above. I created a composite VaultQuery on an attribute of states of contract state types of interest (e.g custom field X = Y), and converted the returned observable (returned from trackBy.future) to a Quasar compatible AsynchListenableFuture. When the state is consumed by a transaction created by a flow triggered by the external action, the future returns and the automatic event (in my case the creation of an other transaction with another party) is executed.

I'm only experimenting / evaluating Corda, not sure how robust this approach would be in production reality, but it seems to work OK, hope this helps in some way.

Some form of higher level workflow flows in Corda, which can wait on external events and conditionally invoke other flows depending on the external action would be of real interest in my context.