Save return values of jobs and display them in the dashboard

[amo13]

I found myself a few times wishing for more insight about what jobs actually do and what their results are. Currently, I have a cron job which loops through a bunch of database records and calls an external API with some attributes from these records. Somewhere between the job code and the API returns, something goes wrong and I am having trouble finding out what precisely.

In the dashboard, the jobs just show up as successful with no more info whatsoever. It would be so nice if I could just put together an array of the results for the iterations of the loop in the job and return it as a result of the perform method. That return value could then be displayed in the dashboard's job view by simply calling to_s or to_json on the returned object. That would allow for instant insight into what the job actually did or resulted in.