Exception handling in Power Automate

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Exception handling is the most common practice used in programming to tackle unwanted or unexpected events. Since exception handling deals with anomalies, it avoids program error, flow error and system crashing.

There are many reasons which can cause exceptions, including expression error, invalid user input, loss of network connection, user attempting to open files which are not available.

The Try Catch mechanism is used to capture exceptions. Try defines a block of statement that may throw an exception. When a specific type of exception occurs, the catch block catches the exception.

Now let us consider a usage scenario to understand Try-Catch mechanism within power automate.

We are using a Power Automate flow to send an HTTP request and based on the response we need to acknowledge in the CRM. If the response to the HTTP request is ‘true’ we need to change a field in CRM to Success. And if the response is ‘false’ the field in CRM should change to Failed.

There can be scenarios that the HTTP request can hit error, or any of the actions can hit error and further iteration of the flow will not happen.

Fig.1

Since there is an error in the HTTP template, the step ‘HTTP-POST Import Opportunity’ has failed and therefore further steps in the flow will not be executed. As the CRM field update step is followed by ‘HTTP-POST Import Opportunity’ step, the field in CRM will not get updated.

To tackle this, we can use Try-Catch method.

Add a new step called Scope. It can be renamed to Try

Fig.2

Add all actions which needs to be handled for exceptions in the scope.

Fig.3

Add another scope step and add actions to perform in case of exceptions

Fig.4

Now click on the three dots of Catch and Configure run after

Fig.5

Set up Configure run after by checking the fields as given below

Fig.6

If any action in the Try block has failed or skipped or has timed out, then the catch block will run.

Once the Try-Catch method is configured, even if the ‘HTTP-POST Import Opportunity’ or any of the action execution fails, the Catch block will run and acknowledge the user through CRM.

In the fig below (Fig.7) we can see that action Get a row by ID-Industry Types has failed.

Fig.7

As we have already configured the run after setting, the Catch block will run.

By this approach, the user can be intimated regarding the error in the flow if any.