[Laravel 8] Using Bus::chain() inside Bus::batch()

[ksassnowski]

Is there a way to combine Bus::chain() with the newly introduced Bus::batch() in Laravel 8? Here's an example of what I want to achieve:

Suppose that after a new employee gets entered into the system an onboarding process gets kicked off. Some of these steps don't have anything to do with each other, but they all need to happen for the "onboarding" to be considered completed. Some of these steps can consist of multiple sub-steps or have dependencies on each other (i.e. can't run before other jobs have been finished). I would like to model it something like this:

Bus::batch([
    new UpdateSomeExternalSystemThatEmployeeWasRegistered(),
    Bus::chain([
        new CreateActiveDirectoryAccount(),
        new SyncActiveDirectoryWithSomeOtherSystem(),
        // This doesn't have anything to do with creating an AD user but it still needs the user to exist.
        // Hence why it can't run before the previous two jobs have finished.
        new AssignLicensesToEmployee(),
    ]),
    new DoSomethingElseInParallel(),
]);

I know that there are a bunch of ways to deal with this without having to use a batch, e.g. using events and dispatching the next job in the process or by wrapping the chain in yet another job. But something like this would give me the ability to treat the entire batch as the overall process.

Another issue I see is that the jobs inside the chain aren't aware of the batch they're being run in. I'm also not entirely sure how the then and catch calls of the batch and chain would interact once you start nesting them.

This might also be a horrible idea but I'm happy to discuss it 😅

[themsaid]

I don't think this can or should be handled at the framework level. Chains can have batches that have chains that have batches etc...

You need to keep track of the process somewhere, like in a database.

[williamjulianvicary]

I have a similar use case. Is it not possible to interact with the job itself, as far as I'm aware the chained jobs just attach themselves to each other in a chain (i.e $job1->chain($job2->chain($job3)) ) so in theory it wouldn't take too much by way of changes to allow this workflow?