Consider way of passing metadata between job definition and instances

[ahdel-r]

Consider way of passing metadata between job definition and instances

[rfdonnelly]

The nice (bad?) thing about Ruby is that you can monkey patch existing classes. In other words, a plugin could modify the Jobrnr::Job::Instance class to add a metadata object.

I agree it would be nice to have an official way to do this. However, I foresee many complications/tradeoffs that would need to be addressed. For example, if plugin A generates metadata on some event and plugin B expects to use that metadata on the same event, how do you ensure that plugin B receives the event after plugin A? This could be solved in various ways but at the cost of complexity.

I don't currently have a need for this but I like the idea. Can revisit if a use case presents itself. Thank you for the suggestion.

[ahdel-r]

Cool - didn't know about the monkey patch feature.
And yes, all use cases I've seen this useful for do not exist within the same event. Typically some information was picked up at an earlier event (e.g. job definition modification for use in the job instance), then the information was used at later event stages or for post application reporting of metrics (e.g. some information regarding the job instance or job reported in stats or pointers for various improvements to the user experience). Things do become complex if the data needs to be shared within the same event between plugins, but that could be solved a number of ways as you mentioned.

Essentially, some sort of metadata passing interface between plugins for extensibility and scalability is nice if the use case presents itself. It is hard for me to present this from a requirements perspective thought right now without an explicit general use case rather than a proprietary one. If I come up with one, I'll let you now.