Better logging of paused Hooks when ActionScheduler is used to run them

[JanThiel]

Due to the way the Crontrol "Pauser" works by injecting just another regular action with a priority of -9999 all executions in ActionScheduler are logged as "Completed".

This is kind of misleading as the actual, expected action is not executed at all. Only the runtime of 0s might indicate something.

I am not quite sure if this should be handled here or in AS and would like to open it up for discussion.

As AS supports proper Exceptions, simply throwing an Exception with a Message "Paused by WP-Crontrol" in the Crontrol Pauser would do the trick. This would result in marking the execution in AS as "failed" with the Message of the Exception in the AS logs.

The other solution in AS would actually require checking for the registered Actions to see if the first one is the Pauser. So I believe the better way would be to to handle it within the Crontrol Pauser explicitly.

What do you think?

[johnbillion]

Thanks for the issue. Throwing an exception might be a good idea, I'll do some testing.

What exactly is your setup for AS? I presume you haven't paused the action_scheduler_run_queue hook itself?

[JanThiel]

No, we haven't paused that hook ;-) But we have actually unscheduled the default AS runner action and run the AS runner using WP-CLI directly for scaling reasons and using the group feature of AS.

In this particular case only one particular hook was paused using Crontrol. The people who paused it "forgot" about that they paused it and sent us down the rabbit holes for hours debugging why the actual registered action was not called although AS logged all hook runs as executed "completed"...

Some more context if you are interested in:
The only way to figure out the issue after some time was to dump $wp_filter[<hook-name>] and realizing that the first action was the Crontrol/Pauser. To make things more complicated: The hook is only used for infrequent, parameterized single actions (part of a sync system). So it is not present all the time in the Crontrol UI and there is no UI to managed paused hooks that are not scheduled. We deleted the relevant option for the paused hooks and unpaused the hook by this.