Alternative to automation condition all_deps_updated_since_cron

[inesplc]

Hi all 👋

My organisation is trying out Declarative Automation for the first time, and I'm looking for help on how to deal with one of our automation policies.

The problem

We want most of our assets to materialise once a day when all its dependencies are updated.
Our policy is looking like this:

    base_automation = (
        # Check if the asset partition falls within the latest time window
        AutomationCondition.in_latest_time_window()
        # Check if a cron tick has passed since the asset was last requested or updated
        & AutomationCondition.cron_tick_passed(cron_schedule, cron_timezone).since_last_handled()
        # Check if an asset is not currently in progress
        & ~AutomationCondition.in_progress()
    )

    parents_automation = AutomationCondition.all_deps_updated_since_cron(cron_schedule, cron_timezone)

    any_parents_in_progress = AutomationCondition.any_deps_match(AutomationCondition.in_progress()).with_label(
        "any parents in progress"
    )
    final_automation = (
        base_automation
        & ~any_parents_in_progress
        & parents_automation.with_label("wait for all parents to be updated")
    )

With this policy we've run into an issue:
Our cron schedule is at 0 3 * * *, but the majority of parents are materialised by jobs before 3AM. This makes the parents update on a different cron tick than the asset we want to materialise, and therefore the parents_automation condition evaluates to false.

Example

Here's an example of an asset at 02:29AM, which shows all parents where updated (last condition), but the cron tick hadn't passed yet (second condition) so the asset doesn't materialise:

and on the next sensor evaluation at 03:16AM the asset is ready to materialise because the cron tick has passed, but now the parents_automation evaluates to False because the parents were updated on the previous cron window.

TLDR

So I guess my question is:
How could I change my parents_automation so that I could check if all dependencies were updated since the asset was last materialised?

[garethbrickman]

My colleague's answer in this GH issue may be pertinent to this: #25145 (comment)

[inesplc]

Thanks Gareth! I somehow missed the right keywords to find this discussion. We ended up moving our cron schedule earlier, and that solves our problem