How to mark Sentry span as a background task?

[punkpeye]

The issue I have is that some requests kick off background activities.

Think something like:

get('/servers', () => {
  setTimeout(() => { startSpan(...); }, 0)

  return doSomething();
})

The issue I am facing is that the span started within setTimeout gets associated with the parent span.

This is a problem when trying to identify things like requests that take a long time because now the request-response time also includes the span that was started without blocking the main request-response.

I think the correct solution is to pass parentSpan: null to startSpan, but wanted to confirm that that's the idiomatic way.

And if I do this, is there some sane way to still comment/leave a link to the parent span?