New: Workflow logging and debugging improvements

📣 Retool Announcements
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I'm excited to announce that we recently made a series of improvements to the Run panel and other mechanisms that are commonly used to debug workflows. These changes include:

  • Added filtering historical runs based on timestamp and workflow run ID in the Run panel.
  • Added searching logs by block name in the Run panel.
  • Added filtering blocks by type in the Run panel.
  • Moved the Use as Example JSON button to the top of the Data tab.
  • Added the ability to download JSON data from the JSON tab of block outpus or from the JSON tab of the Run panel.
  • Added workflowRunContext to the Input tab of block outputs.
  • Added endedAtEpochMs to workflowRunContext in the Input tab of block outputs.

To take advantage of these improvements, use the following best practices:

  • Be sure to reference the workflow Run ID and the time that the workflow concluded in the body of your global error handler with workflowContext.currentRun.workflowRunId and workflowContext.lastRun.endedAtEpochMs. You can also emit both properties by default by connecting your Retool organization to Datadoog or Sentry. Having the workflowRunId and timestamp handy at debug time will allow you to quickly filter workflow runs to the errored workflow run.
  • Name all of your blocks descriptively to make them easy to search for in the run panel.
  • Reproduce workflow errors manually by using copied block JSON from the run panel as an input to downstream blocks.
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