Search code examples
google-cloud-tasks

Can I use wildcards when deleting Google Cloud Tasks?

I'm very new to Google Cloud Tasks.

I'm wondering, is there a way to use wildcards when deleting a task? For example, if I potentially had 3 tasks in queue using the following ID naming structure...

  1. id-123-task-1
  2. id-123-task-2
  3. id-123-task-3

Could I simply delete id-123-task-* to delete all 3, or would I have to delete all 3 specific ID's every time? I guess I'm trying to limit the number of required API invocations to delete everything related to 'id-123'.

Solution

  • Can I use wildcards when deleting Google Cloud Tasks?

    As of today, wildcards are not supported within Google Cloud Tasks. I can not confirm that you could pass the Google Cloud Task's ID as you mentioned id-123-task-* will delete all the tasks.

    Nonetheless, if you are creating tasks for an specific purpose in mind, you could create a separate queue for this kind of tasks.

    Not only you will win in terms of organizing your tasks, but when you would like to delete all, you will only need to purge all tasks from the specified queue making only 1 API invocation.

    Here you could see how to purge all tasks from the specified queue, and also how to delete tasks and queues.

    Also, I attached the API documentation in case you need further information about purging queues in Cloud Tasks.

    As stated here, take into account that if you purge all the tasks from a queue:

    Do not create new tasks immediately after purging a queue. Wait at least a second. Tasks created in close temporal proximity to a purge call will also be purged.

    Also, if you are using named tasks, as stated here:

    You can assign your own name to a task by using the name parameter. However, this introduces significant performance overhead, resulting in increased latencies and potentially increased error rates associated with named tasks. These costs can be magnified significantly if tasks are named sequentially, such as with timestamps.

    As a consequence, if you are using named tasks, the documentation recommends using a well-distributed prefix for task names, such as a hash of the contents.

    I think this is the best solution if you would like to limit the amount of API calls.

    I hope it helps.