Workflows: actor ID should not use the # character (Workflows not working with Cosmos DB)

[ItalyPaleAle]

In what area(s)?

/area runtime

What version of Dapr?

1.10.x
master

Description

This issue was originally reported by @mPyKen here:

When Workflows creates the actor ID, it includes a # in the name: dapr/components-contrib#2071 (comment)

https://github.com/dapr/dapr/blob/beef33d04f9528e312fe5d71ab6318a9c0728830/pkg/runtime/wfengine/workflow.go#L466-L470

This makes Workflows not usable with certain state stores such as Cosmos DB.

After discussing with @cgillum offline, we think the best approach may be to change how actor IDs are named by workflows, using a different character. This will be a breaking change (on an alpha building block), but because the # is not commonly used, we are unsure what other issues may appear.

[mPyKen]

It would be nice if the delimiter was configurable on any state store when enabling actorStateStore. That way it would still be backwards compatible. You never know which database accepts which characters or when users actually want to use those reserved characters (e.g. in a workflow name)

  - name: actorStateStore
    value: "true"
  - name: actorStateStoreReservedCharacters
    value: "|#" # probably better to split this into multiple variables

[ItalyPaleAle]

I would err on the side of caution and just avoid using any character that is not a-z0-9-_, so the burden is not on the user to configure this

[cgillum]

Hi @artursouza. Can we reopen this issue? The PR that closed it didn't fully resolve the problem. I realized there are still cases where we might use # in the actor ID - specifically, we need to update some internal code in workflow.go.

[artursouza]

Done