Tips and tricks

This page contains examples of coding patterns in WDL. Sometimes, the correct WDL way of doing things is not immediately obvious, and here we provide some worked examples.

Optional argument with a default

Examine a situation where you want to write a task that takes an optional argument with a default. For example, the task hello takes an optional username argument. If this is not supplied, the default is dave.jones.

workflow foo {
    String? username
    hello { input: who = username }
}

task hello {
    String? who
    String who_actual = select_first([who, "dave.jones"])

    command {
        echo "Hello, ${who_actual}"
    }
    output {
        String result = read_string(stdout())
    }
}

Assertions

Currently, WDL does not have a way to throw exceptions, or report errors. A way around this limitation is to write an assert task (suggested by @mlin).

task assert {
    Boolean value
    String msg

    command {
        if [ "${value}" == "false" ]; then
            echo $msg
            exit 1
        fi
        exit 0
    }
}

You can call it from a workflow when you want to check a condition.

workflow foo {
    call assert { input: value= CONDITION_TO_CHECK,
                         msg = ERROR_MESSAGE }
}

A method that works directly with the platform error reporting mechanism, suggested by @jtratner, is:

workflow show_error {
    call make_error {}
}

task make_error {
    command <<<
        echo '{"error": {"type": "AppError", "message": "x must be at least 2' $(hostname)'"}}' > job_error.json
        exit 1
    >>>
}

(including the hostname in the error message allows the message to have the root job ID, facilitating debugging in complex workflows that may be deeply nested.)