TransferActivity fails: attempts to process string as dict.

[tskluzac]

@renan-souza and I discovered a bug this morning on Defiant where a TransferActivity is invoked. The error we get specifically from the message_handler is

"""
2024-05-29 11:49:57,002 - zambeze.cli_agent - INFO - [mh] Flushing activity message to flowcept
2024-05-29 11:49:57,002 - zambeze.cli_agent - ERROR - 'str' object has no attribute 'origin_agent_id'
"""

It seems that we need to alter the processing to ensure that a TransferActivity is correctly parsed. Tests are needed to ensure this doesn't happen again.

The simplest way to reproduce this error is to generate a standalone transfer activity between any two endpoints, such as:

transfer = TransferActivity(
    name="Transfer end result Tyler's personal (non-work) computer",
    source_target=f"globus://{work_EP_ID}/Users/username/Desktop/tmp_zambeze/a.gif",
    dest_directory=f"globus://{personal_EP_ID}/Users/username/z_results",
    override_existing=False,
)

In other words, if you check out the imagemagick_globus example, the TransferActivity there will fail to execute.

[wigging]

Can you provide a basic example that produces this error?

[tskluzac]

Can you provide a basic example that produces this error?

Yes, just added to the description now! Long-story short -- anything that uses a standalone TransferActivity (aka the last step of any workflow where you may want to Transfer data out... does not apply to implicit data transfers that happen throughout workflow execution).

[wigging]

I'm just now digging into this. I noticed ShellActivity and TransferActivity inherit from Activity. Is it necessary to subclass this activity? Can the ShellActivity and TransferActivity be their own classes without having to subclass something?