Possible to show output of process on page?

[parterburn]

Awesome video walkthrough, @adrianna-chang-shopify! In the example, you have puts element in the process method, which got me thinking this gem could be a nice drop-in to run some ad-hoc reporting for certain use-cases...if the output of those puts was displayed on the page somewhere.

Is that possible with this gem setup by chance?

[adrianna-chang-shopify]

Hey @parterburn ! Can you expand on your use case a bit more for me? The maintenance tasks gem is ultimately designed to make it easy to perform one-off data changes in production. I don't know if it makes sense to use it as a reporting tool, although you're welcome to write a task that outputs to your application's Rails logger or emits metrics to an observability service like DataDog.

[internethostage]

I was also looking into having some observability on the output of a task.
My use case is basically that I have a task that I run every once in a while to import data from a csv file.
Its useful for me to see how many records were created and how many were updated from this task.

As suggested above, I could just send this data to an external service like Datadog, or go search on the Rails logger, but I am stubborn and wanted it on the task ui. 😄

I did a hack to achieve this, but its not pretty.
I patched the following 2 methods:

    def persist_progress(number_of_ticks, duration)
      update_columns(arguments: arguments.merge("task_results" => task.task_results)) if task.respond_to?(:task_results)

      super
    end

    def start(count)
      task.define_singleton_method(:task_results) do
        @task_results ||= Hash.new(0)
      end
      task.task_results.merge!(arguments["task_results"]) if arguments["task_results"]

      super
    end

Then on the task itself whenever I want to record something I have the task_results hash to dump what I need. This gets persisted to the arguments column of the task on each run of the process method, so it even works if the task is paused.
The task_results is displayed on the webui under the Arguments section of an executed run.

If anyone else believes they could benefit from this, I can give this idea an extra spin with a cleaner approach.

[artyrcheek]

Yeah, I would like this, Just a simple output log would go a long way for us.