Can I use an oozie action as a template that I call many times?

Question

I have a shell oozie action that takes in a number of arguments that get passed to the shell script. I want to trigger that action multiple times with different arguments each time. An example dag would look something like:

    Start
   /  |  \
f(a) f(d) f(g)
 |    |    |
 V    V    V
f(b) f(e) f(h)
 |    |    |
 V    V    V
f(c) f(f) f(i)
   \  |  /
     End

Is it possible to achieve this without having a bunch of duplicate actions?

Answer 1

yes, it is possible with Oozie sub-workflow option.

Compose the Shell action as a sub-workflow and call the sub-workflow from many places from the main workflow with different input values.

    <action name="call_sub_workflow_1">
      <sub-workflow>
          <app-path>${workflowAppUri}/sub_workflow_with_shell_action/</app-path>
          <propagate-configuration/>
          <configuration>
              <property>
                  <name>argument_1</name>
                  <value>${wf:actionData('previous_action')['val1']}</value>
              </property>
              <property>
                  <name>argument_2</name>
                  <value>${val2}</value>
              </property>
          </configuration>
      </sub-workflow>
      <ok to="End"/>
      <error to="Fail"/>
    </action>

Main workflow with sub-workflow directory structure will looks like,

   main_workflow_dir
   |
   |--job.properties
   |
   |--workflow.xml  # main workflow, can call sub workflow from multiple places
   |
   |--sub_workflow_with_shell_action
       |
       |--shell script
       |
       |--workflow.xml  # sub workflow contains the shell script action and takes arguments