Questions on Declarative Workflow Extensibility, Serialization, and Designer Roadmap

[thumer]

Hello Agent Framework team,

I have a few roadmap and architecture questions regarding declarative workflows and long-term extensibility.

1. Workflow serialization / persistence

• Is there (or will there be) a supported way to serialize a built runtime Workflow instance into a persistent structure (e.g., JSON/YAML)?
• Is round-trip support planned?
• Declarative YAML -> runtime Workflow
• runtime Workflow -> declarative-like JSON/YAML

2. Custom C# executors in declarative workflows

• Is support planned for mapping custom YAML kind values to user-defined C# executors?
• More generally: will there be an official extension mechanism for custom declarative actions/executors?
• Is this on the roadmap? If yes, is there any rough timeline or milestone?

3. Visual workflow designer

• Is a first-party graphical designer for workflows planned?
• If yes, should we expect capabilities comparable to tools like Elsa Studio (visual composition, validation, debugging, import/export)?

Thank you for any guidance. Even high-level roadmap direction would be very helpful for planning.

[moonbox3]

Adding @peibekwe to help answer.

[loharkar]

Please could you help answering second question - "Custom C# executors in declarative workflows", I think currently only InvokeAzureAgent (which invokes a Foundry agent) is supported.

[pjirsa]

@thumer - regarding Declarative YAML -> runtime Workflow
That is how declarative workflows "work" today. You have to write a python script or C# code that loads the YAML file definition and convert it to a Workflow object using the declarative WorkflowFactory class.
Several examples exist in the samples folder under workflows/declarative - StudentTeacher

[thumer]

Thanks @pjirsa for the clarification and the link to the sample.

I just have two quick follow-up questions:

1. Workflow serialization / round-trip
   Is there currently (or planned) any way to serialize a built runtime Workflow instance back into a declarative format (e.g., JSON/YAML)? In other words, support for something like a round-trip:
   YAML → Workflow → YAML/JSON.

2. Visual workflow designer
   Is a first-party graphical workflow designer for composing and debugging workflows currently planned?

Even a high-level roadmap direction would be very helpful. Thanks again!

[peibekwe]

@thumer - Thank you for the questions. I will attempt to address as much as possible:

• Workflow serialization and persistence: As @pjirsa mentioned, declarative YAML gets converted to pro-code workflow for execution. There's no conversion from pro-code (or runtime workflow) to declarative workflow and there are also no current plans to support this. For persistence, the closest thing to this is checkpointing. Workflows (both declarative and pro-code) support checkpointinf during execution and they can be rehydrated from checkpoints. You can find more details about that here and there are samples in the repo as well.
• Custom C# executors in declarative workflows: I'm guessing that the need for this is to be able execute custom code in declarative workflows? We currently do not support custom executors. It's something that we briefly looked at but there are no current plans on this. However, we do support InvokeFunctionTool YAML kind that allows you to define your C# function and execute it directly from your declarative workflow. This should provide similar functionality as a custom executor in terms of extensibility. There's a sample for this as well. @loharkar - This should also answer your question as well.
• Visual workflow designer: We do have Dev UI (Python, dotnet) which is not intended for production use. There are plans for a newer version or another tool that will build on DevUI to provide visual designer, so that's something that will be coming in the future. I don't have a solid timeline on that to provide at the moment.