FlowDrop Workflow Specification 1.0-draft

A timestamp is never fabricated

A run that has not finished has no finish time, and a missing creation time is missing. Publishing "now" in place of either makes a consumer believe something that did not happen.

The rule

Normative: this is the rule
  1. lastExecuted is the run's completion stamp, or null where the run has not completed, on the full document and the lightweight one alike.
  2. createdAt is the run's creation stamp, or null where none is recorded, on both documents equally.
  3. No timestamp is substituted for a missing one.

What it means

A run that has not finished has no finish time, and the response says so directly: lastExecuted is null, not the moment the request happened to be made and not the run's start time standing in for its end. The same null, on the same run, is what both the full document and the lightweight one answer — there is no version of the run where one gives an honest null and the other improvises.

Example

A run that has never completed, polled through both the full document and the lightweight one, then the same run after it finishes:

lastExecuted on both documents while the run is unfinishednull
null
lastExecuted once the completion stamp is setstamped
"2025-01-01T00:00:00+00:00"

Why

Recorded under OPEN-19.

Rule identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered. Each implementation publishes its own standing against these rules; this specification does not.spec 1.0-draft · PIPE-9 · changed in spec 1.0