powerautomate

Error Handling Demo

Getting notifications when your flow has failed because of an error is critical to maintaining business continuity. Also, the notification should provide the cause of the error to help you resolve it quickly.

In this Lab

This lab will focus on how you can use Configure run after and terminate flow, options that is available for flow actions, to help isolate errors. It also overviews the built-in error reports.

• Learning objectives- Error Handling in Power Automate
• Duration - 20 minutes
• Scenario - Trigger a flow with induced exception and then manage it using run after and terminate flow options.
• Prerequisites - Each student must have a dedicated custom SharePoint list named Expenses-your-name. This list was already created during the lab.

Task 1

a. Let us start with creating a cloud flow that will fail :)

• Import the Error Handling Demo.zip cloud flow available in the resources section of this lab.
• Configure the actions while importing the flow. Click My Flows > Import > Import Package(Legacy)
• After importing the flow will look like this:

b. Adjust the values for the Site Address name and List Name name to your values

c. Save and Test the flow

Note: The SharePoint item ID is not on the list. This will make the flow fail.

c. Check the Cloud flow activity for failed runs. This typically takes some time to reflect, making error handling even more important.

Task 2

Now we will add error handling for the Update Item step in the flow:

a. Add a parallel branch after Update Item action. Choose the Send an email(v2) operation in the parallel branch.

• To: your-email
• Subject: Update item action failed
• Body: But error handling worked :)

b. Configure run after by clicking on the three dots on the Send an email action

c. Select Has failed in the run after menu. This will ensure that this parallel branch action runs only if the previous action (Update an item) fails.

Note: The parallel branch turns into a dotted red line. This indicates that run after has been configured.

d. Save and Test the flow. Verify the flow run and check your email for the failed run.

Note: While the run after operation can be very useful to send instant notifications for failed actions in a flow, it can be difficult to implement error handling on every action. So we need to implement something more generic, which notifies immediately after the flow fails(without knowing which action failed).

Note: All actions in the left branch were skipped as soon as the Update an item action failed.

Task 3

a. Remove the parallel branch by deleting its action. Add a new Send an email(v2) action at the end of the flow.

• To: your-email
• Subject: Your flow has failed :(
• Body: Flow as failed.

b. Configure run after by clicking on the three dots on the Send an email action

• Select is skipped in the run after menu
• Click Done
• Notice the red dotted line indicating the run after configuration

d. Save and Test the flow. The flow should run successfully (even though Update an item action failed). This is because our error handling is good.

• A disadvantage of this is that the flow run does not show as failed in the history.
• Also, our email does not have any information on the flow that failed

Task 4

a. Update the name of the last action to Failure Email

b. Add a new control step Terminate. This will terminate the flow only if the Failure Email has successfully run.

• Status: Failed
• Message: Failed but the error handling worked

c. Update the email body to include more details from the flow.

• Expression to build the flow run:

concat('https://make.powerautomate.com/environments/', workflow()?['tags']['environmentName'], '/flows/', workflow()?['name'], '/runs/', workflow()?['run']['name'])

d. Save and Test the flow. Verify the email recievied with a link to the failed flow run.