Automatically run failed dependencies when submitting jobs
19 September 2023
Previously, when submitting jobs to run the platform would reject requests if any of the requested action’s dependencies had previously failed.
This required users to explicitly request those failed dependencies to be
re-run. This was cumbersome, and was not the same behaviour as when running
actions locally on user’s machines with the opensafely run
command.
We have now changed this behaviour, so that if you submit an action to run, any dependent actions that have previously failed will also be scheduled to run. This should make submitting jobs simpler in many cases.
For context, the original design for this behaviour was to encourage users to ensure their code runs succesfully locally before submitting to run for real. This avoids overloading the system with jobs that may fail anyway due to code errors. This is still a very important best practice what we strongly encourage users to do before submitting jobs.
However, this resulted in an awkward workflow for submitting batches of jobs, hence this change.