How Tasks Work
In Mergent, each unit of background work is represented by a task. Tasks are created by your application using Mergent’s client libraries (like mergent-js) or the API.
When a task gets created on Mergent, it is added to a queue, which reliably
persists tasks until they are ready to be processed by your application. You can
set tasks to process immediately, after a delay
, or at a specific
scheduled_for
time.
When a task is ready to be processed, Mergent sends a task request to your application via an HTTP POST request. Each individual task request is automatically logged and stored as an invocation.
In the case where a task request cannot be processed, such as if your application is experiencing downtime, Mergent will attempt to retry the task request according to our retry policy.
Example: Let’s say you have an e-commerce platform and a customer makes a purchase. Sending a confirmation email is important but it isn’t time-sensitive and can be processed outside of the main flow, preventing slowdowns for other users.
In this scenario, you would create a task in Mergent that holds the information about the email and when it’s ready to be processed, Mergent sends a request to your application to send the email.
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