An activity function that returns false is converted to null in orchestrator about azure-functions-durable-js HOT 11 CLOSED

I think undefined and NaN could be difficult to support. Suggest closing this issue and adding a new one to document valid return types. @ConnorMcMahon what do you think?

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We could theoretically encode it in a specific way, but I'm not sure it is worth the effort for now. I think documenting it is the right approach, and we only invest the effort if there is demand for it.

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Yup, thanks for the triage, @hossam-nasr!

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Is this running in Azure or locally? If it's in Azure we could look into some of our online telemetry to see what's going on. If it's local, can you verify whether this still happens after clearing all messages in the storage queues and trying again?

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Hi,

I'm running my functions locally for now.
I've deleted all queues (durablefunctionhub-control : 0-3 and workitems), an still having this behaviour.
I've also deleted the History and Instances tables.

I'm running VS Code with DurableTask extension v1.7.0

Thnaks

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Repro'd this. Also occurs for 0, ''/"", and NaN.

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This has been partially fixed; when returning undefined or NaN, which have no equivalent in the underlying .NET extension, the orchestrator's output still appears as null.

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Hi, i think the problem is not solved for return value false.
I'm using durable-functions v. 1.4.4 for javascript and when i return true from my activity function everything works fine. However when my activity function returns false my orchestrator function receives null.
I'm running the code on Azure.

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To my surprise, I am too seeing this problem @Mirco469. I'll investigate this shortly

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I think something changed at the azure-functions-nodejs-worker level because durable-extension, which is the engine that powers azure-functions-durable-js is also receiving null as the output of the activity, so the nodejs worker must be failing to serialize false.

This is the line in durable-extension where I would expect to receive false as the value of serializedOutput:
https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-durable-extension/blob/c01a22628685b4d427243552ab3f9d4e03076266/src/WebJobs.Extensions.DurableTask/Listener/TaskActivityShim.cs#L74

Unfortunately, with the holidays coming up and my team-members from that team likely out of office, this might take a little bit to fix. In the meantime, returning a string should allow us to at least mitigate this issue without losing functionality.

I'll look to submitting a patch as soon as my nodejs-worker team-members are back from their holiday break! ⚡ ⚡

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@davidmrdavid has this been fixed by Azure/azure-functions-nodejs-worker#383? Can we close this issue?

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