temporalio/temporal · error

failed to decode TemporalNamespaceDivision field: %w

Error message

failed to decode TemporalNamespaceDivision field: %w

What it means

ArchetypeIDFromExecutionInfo extracts a CHASM archetype ID from the workflow execution info's TemporalNamespaceDivision payload. If the raw payload cannot be decoded into a string (corrupt or wrongly-encoded data), the function returns UnspecifiedArchetypeID along with this wrapped error.

Source

Thrown at service/worker/common/chasm_util.go:29

	"go.temporal.io/server/common/searchattribute/sadefs"
)

func ArchetypeIDFromExecutionInfo(
	executionInfo *workflowpb.WorkflowExecutionInfo,
) (chasm.ArchetypeID, error) {
	indexedField := executionInfo.SearchAttributes.GetIndexedFields()
	if indexedField == nil {
		return chasm.WorkflowArchetypeID, nil
	}

	nsDivisionPayload, ok := indexedField[sadefs.TemporalNamespaceDivision]
	if !ok {
		return chasm.WorkflowArchetypeID, nil
	}

	var nsDivisionStr string
	if err := payload.Decode(nsDivisionPayload, &nsDivisionStr); err != nil {
		return chasm.UnspecifiedArchetypeID, fmt.Errorf("failed to decode TemporalNamespaceDivision field: %w", err)
	}

	if len(nsDivisionStr) == 0 || !unicode.IsDigit(rune(nsDivisionStr[0])) {
		return chasm.WorkflowArchetypeID, nil
	}

	archetypeID, err := strconv.ParseUint(nsDivisionStr, 10, 32)
	if err != nil {
		return chasm.UnspecifiedArchetypeID, fmt.Errorf("failed to parse archetypeID: %w", err)
	}

	return chasm.ArchetypeID(archetypeID), nil
}

View on GitHub (pinned to bde624efd1)

Solutions

1. Inspect the payload's encoding/metadata and re-encode it as the expected plain string before storage.
2. Ensure all services in the cluster run compatible versions so the TemporalNamespaceDivision field is written and read consistently.
3. Treat UnspecifiedArchetypeID + error as a fallback (defaults to WorkflowArchetypeID only for empty/non-digit strings) and alert on the decode failure to catch data corruption early.
4. If the payload is unrecoverable, clear/rewrite the field via the appropriate migration so future writes use the string encoding.

Example fix

// before
payload := payloads.NewEncodedValue(raw, "unknown-encoding")
info.NamespaceDivision = payload // fails to decode later
// after
b, _ := proto.Marshal(&commonpb.Payload{Metadata: map[string]string{"encoding": encodingtype.Raw}, Data: []byte(nsDivision)})
info.NamespaceDivision = payloads.NewData(b) // decodable string payload

func nsDivisionDecodable(p *commonpb.Payload) error {
  var s string
  if err := payload.Decode(p, &s); err != nil {
    return err
  }
  return nil
}

func isStringPayload(p *commonpb.Payload) bool {
  enc := p.GetMetadata()["encoding"]
  return enc == encodingtype.String || enc == encodingtype.Json
}

archetypeID, err := common.ArchetypeIDFromExecutionInfo(info)
if err != nil {
  logger.Warn("namespace division payload undecodable; defaulting archetype", tag.Error(err))
  archetypeID = chasm.WorkflowArchetypeID
}

When it happens

Trigger: Calling ArchetypeIDFromExecutionInfo on an execution info whose namespace-division payload was written with a non-string encoding (e.g. binary/protobuf bytes instead of a plain string payload) or is corrupted in persistence.

Common situations: Mixed-version clusters where an older writer encoded the field differently than the current decoder expects; data migrations or manual persistence edits; CHASM experiments flag differences between services writing and reading the field.

Understand the failure class

• Parsing and encoding errors: unexpected token, malformed input — why parsers reject input and how to find the real culprit.

Related errors

• ErrInvalidTransition
• failed to deserialize component: %w
• failed to deserialize data: %w
• %w: zombie workflow cannot be updated
• ErrStaleReference

AI-assisted analysis of temporalio/temporal@bde624efd1 (2026-09-01). Data as JSON: /api/errors/41f5804bc27edd1a. Report an issue: GitHub.