Consider: global task ID

[Vectorial1024]

Usually, tasks are started anonymously with no ID. But, since we have full creative control here, we can just allow users to choose that a task must have a global ID. This does not affect task execution, but what we can do is that, we can save the ID in e.g. the database, and then when we want to, we can just "recreate" the task from the ID and check whether it is still running.

A ULID would be a good random globally-unique ID. Or, the task can have a user-specified constant ID for singleton tasks (i.e. task can only be run with a single instance).

Think about whether this is a good idea.

[Vectorial1024]

After some thinking, I can think of the following:

• Every task at least gets a ULID task ID; this enables the "put to background then recheck later" use case
• User may specify a string task ID, which replaces the aforementioned ULID task ID
• Task IDs are converted to base64 for coding convenience
• With a task ID available, users may then create a special, simplified object that checks whether the task with the given ID is still running
• We usually do not check for ID uniqueness; when checking whether a task is still running, we will simply return the first one we found
  • This is not a problem if we are using ULIDs
  • If users are using their specific task IDs, they have responsibility to make sure the task IDs are not clashing
  • Alternatively, we can set a toggle to make the task creation fail when it detects a task ID clash