Proposal: Enhanced Time-based Workflow Filtering

[terrytangyuan]

Summary

Introducing additional flags for Argo CLI to enhance existing functionality of workflow filtering.

Motivation

Per discussions here, the current implementation of the following two flags --since and --older for argo list, when used jointly, can cause confusion and users might interpret it in different ways. Recall that --since represents the relative duration since the workflow is created and --older represents the relative duration after the workflow finishes. The current implementation of this when using both flags is filtering from the list workflows with the following WorkflowPredicate:

func(startTime time.Time, endTime time.Time) WorkflowPredicate {
	return func(wf Workflow) bool {
		return wf.ObjectMeta.CreationTimestamp.After(startTime) && !wf.Status.FinishedAt.IsZero() && wf.Status.FinishedAt.Time.Before(endTime)
	}
}

One can interpret this in multiple ways, as pointed out in the discussion, for example (using A and B to denote two time points):

1. WorkflowStartedBetween - the workflow started between times A and B.
2. WorkflowFinishedBetween - the workflow finished between times A and B.
3. WorkflowRanBetween - the workflow was running between the two times - i.e. start time is before B and (not finished OR finished after time A).
4. WorkflowWasBetween - the workflow was ran and finished between the two times - i.e. started after A and finished before B.

This will lead to confusion to users and we need to come up with a better way to distinguish between different use cases.

Proposal

We introduce two additional flags related to time:

• --from-time
• --until-time

and another two additional flags related to status:

• --from-status
• --until-status

where the status can be any one from workflow_types.NodePhase as well as "created" as an additional phase to distinguish from the other phases.

For example, if argo list --from-time 2h --from-status=created --until-time=10m --until-status=succeeded is executed, the user should expect a list of workflows that are created from 2 hours ago and succeeded 10 minutes ago.

Compatibility with Existing Flags

1. When those four proposed flags are used, the existing flags --older and --since should not be used and will be overriden by the behavior of the added flags.
2. If --completed and --running are also specified, they will be ignored.
3. Additional selectors will apply after the list of workflows gets filtered based on the four proposed flags.

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Message from the maintainers:

If you wish to see this enhancement implemented please add a 👍 reaction to this issue! We often sort issues this way to know what to prioritize.

[alexec]

what about --started-after --finished-before - i.e. mention the field

[terrytangyuan]

@alexec It's an option but there will be more flags since there are several different phases to cover.

[alexec]

Should probably be consistent with git options.

[terrytangyuan]

Not much community interest. Closing for now.