No way to tell if there isn't a current span.

[samuel-williams-shopify]

opentelemetry-ruby/api/lib/opentelemetry/trace.rb

Line 48 in 0e59ad2

def current_span(context = nil)

I need to know if there is a valid span or not.

Is the best we can do:

::OpenTelemetry::Trace.current_span == ::OpenTelemetry::Trace::Span::INVALID

This seems pretty clunky to me.

Maybe we can fix this:

1. Introduce ::OpenTelemetry::Trace.current_span? which returns nil if no context/current span (? suffix means optional).
2. Introduce a keyword argument def current_span(default: Span::INVALID) so we could invoke current_span(default: nil).
3. Introduce Span#valid? or something like that, e.g. ::OpenTelemetry::Trace.current_span.valid?.

For now, I'll use ::OpenTelemetry::Trace.current_span == ::OpenTelemetry::Trace::Span::INVALID because that's the best option that currently works, but I think using a sentinel value is a bit ugly.

[samuel-williams-shopify]

See socketry/traces-backend-open_telemetry#6 for some related context.

[arielvalentin]

Is the recording? predicate insufficient here?

https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/api/#isrecording

[samuel-williams-shopify]

It may be, I will try it.

[fbogsany]

::OpenTelemetry::Trace.current_span.context.valid? will do what you want.

::OpenTelemetry::Trace.current_span.recording? will tell you if the span is recording, but it is possible to have a valid non-recording span (quite common with Shopify's verbosity sampler).

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