Foundry lease and resource lifetime

Properties vs Services

Bag	Purpose	Cleared when the lease ends	Auto-dispose
Properties	Workflow / execution data (outputs, correlation, validation results)	Yes	No
Services	Extension capabilities (OpenTelemetry, performance monitoring, etc.)	Yes	Yes (IDisposable)

Use Properties / SetProperty for business data. Extensions register long-lived objects on Services.

Services.TryAdd does not dispose a value it rejects — the caller keeps it. Services.TryRemove returns the removed instance already disposed.

What the foundry owns

The foundry disposes only what it owns, which is Services. Operations and middleware you pass to AddOperation, ReplaceOperations, AddMiddleware or AddMiddlewares stay yours: ending the lease releases the references but never calls Dispose() on them. Register anything the foundry should tear down on Services instead.

Pooled vs caller-owned foundry

• await smith.ForgeAsync(workflow) — foundry is pooled; its execution state is cleared after each run (Properties emptied, Services disposed).
• await smith.ForgeAsync(workflow, data) — the smith runs over your dictionary and leaves its contents in place, so results are readable after the call.
• await smith.ForgeAsync(workflow, foundry) — you own the foundry until you dispose it.

Health checks

CreateHealthCheckService() registers the returned HealthCheckService on foundry.Services, so its periodic timer stops when the foundry lease ends even if you never dispose it. Disposing it yourself as well is safe — HealthCheckService.Dispose() is idempotent — and is still the clearer choice when the service outlives the run that created it.

Cancellation and compensation

Forward cancellation (OperationCanceledException) does not run saga compensation. After a real workflow failure, compensation runs in reverse order; if RestoreAsync throws (including OperationCanceledException on the same token), the error is logged and collected unless FailFastCompensation stops the walk early.

Default foundry options:

Option	Default	Effect
FailFastCompensation	false	When true, stop compensating after the first restore failure.
ThrowOnCompensationError	false	When true (or fail-fast), throw AggregateException including compensation errors after the original failure.

When both are false, compensation errors are logged and the original workflow exception is rethrown.

Upgrading custom contexts

If you implement IWorkflowExecutionContext or IWorkflowFoundry yourself, expose IFoundryServices Services on the execution context (typically new FoundryServices() per context). Extension-owned state belongs on Services (Set / TryAdd); workflow data stays in Properties. Custom foundries should call Services.DisposeAll() when the lease ends, and must not dispose caller-supplied operations or middleware. Release-specific notes live in the repository CHANGELOG.