Excel dynamic content failing in condition within loop

[michowl]

I've got an odd Action Failed error in a loop. I can't look at what the values of the condition are. Nor can I scroll through the results of each iteration like I usually can with a successful flow.

First image is what I"m trying to do, the second is the error I get when I run values through. Note, with this case, I have verified that the User Profile Department contains the string of one row Department in the Excel sheet.

[v-micsh-msft]

Hi @michowl,

Just from the error message, I think this error should be related with the previous action. If one of the previous action failed, the following action will not be executed.

Would you please share the whole flow here?

To perform an easy test, please try to put the Excel Deparment in the Object Name part, and specify the Outlook user Profile Deparment (or some string value, better with the one listed in Excel) in the Value part.

Then check to see if this would work.

Regards

[michowl]

The flow is a bit long to screenshot here, but here's the flow id: 5f542d6f-a051-4fcf-ab85-7c4f0a1f4e48

The User Profile department will always be longer than the Excel Dept. The Excel Dept is just a keyword.

However, I tried your idea (IF Excel Dept contains "ABC") and the failure remains the same with the same message.

I should also note that the flow ran just fine several days before the error began appearing.

The condition appears to be fine as well: the Condition is green checked. But the loop is red marked. Is there a way the loop itself could be failing?

Here are the outputs from the most recent failed run (before testing your idea), where you can see the Department strings

Office 365 User Profile

INPUTS

• User
  janedoe@fake.com

---

OUTPUTS

• User id
  [id...]
• Display name
  Jane Doe
• Given name
  Jane
• Surname
  Doe
• Email
  janedoe@fake.com
• Nickname
  janedoe
• Business Phones
  [ "+1 (555) 1234567" ]
• Account enabled?
  true
• User Principal Name
  janedoe@fake.com
• Department
  ABC Acronym Dept US
• Job title
  Jobby Job

Excel Get Rows

INPUTS

• File name
  /dynflow/leads routing.xlsx
• Table name
  Table1

---

OUTPUTS

• value
  [
    {
      "@odata.etag": "",
      "ItemInternalId": "72eAmwnLDL8",
      "Department": "XYZ",
      "Owner_x0020_Email": "johnsmith@fake.com",
      "__PowerAppsId__": "72eAmwnLDL8"
    }, {
      "@odata.etag": "",
      "ItemInternalId": "3Z8NC0kLOxw",
      "Department": "ABC",
      "Owner_x0020_Email": "billjones@fake.com",
      "__PowerAppsId__": "3Z8NC0kLOxw"
    }, {
      "@odata.etag": "",
      "ItemInternalId": "OxFJplfMqQY",
      "Department": "MNO",
      "Owner_x0020_Email": "annbates@fake.com",
      "__PowerAppsId__": "OxFJplfMqQY"
    }, {
      "@odata.etag": "",
      "ItemInternalId": "CGVE8W-ujP0",
      "Department": "Dummy",
      "Owner_x0020_Email": "dud@dud.com",
      "__PowerAppsId__": "CGVE8W-ufsd"
    }
  ]

[michowl]

i went ahead and assembled a series of screenshots to show the whole flow. (The two conditions near the top just check for empty fields and terminate the flow if true.)

[v-micsh-msft]

Hi @michowl,

Thanks for the update.

I will test this from my side and share the results here.

Previous testing for the condition works at my side, I will follow your screenshots to configure the Actions this time.

Regards

[masisley]

Hi @michowl,

I believe everything is working as expected here. I created a similar flow that has  failure in a condition inside a loop:

You can inspect the inner actions to see what happened and cycle through the iterations with the Show run pane at the top. Likely one of your requests to Dynamics failed, which causes the entire Apply to Each scope to fail. Since these requests run in parallel, it could be that Dynamics chokes when it receives many requests at once. Once we know the failure, if it looks like a problem on our side we can potentially involve the connector team/Dynamics team in the investigation.

The reason that the display looks like this is that the first iteration didn't meet the branching condition. If it had, you'd see a red exclamation mark in the "If Yes" section.

Let me know if you have any more questions/my explanation isn't clear.

Best,

Mark

[michowl]

@masisley Good to know that the for each requests run in parallel. Good design decision.

However, that should not cause the issue. Only one iteration of the loop should pass the condition and call Dynamics. Further, there are only 4 rows in the table, so I doubt the D365 Web API would fail with such a light workload.

I'll try recreating the flow from scratch to see if the problem persists

[masisley · Accepted solution]

If only one request is reaching Dynamics, then you should expand the action and navigate to the iteration that should have issued the request, as I did in the screenshot I attached (In your case, expand List Records). You'll likely see a more interesting error. If you don't, expand the other two actions that follow it.

[michowl]

That's exactly the problem. As you can see in the original post, I cannot view any further detailed information in the flow run.

[michowl]

Foot in my mouth. I guess I didn't click far enough down. I am able to view details of the Dyn calls and found the error. *facepalm* 

[masisley]

Ah, excellent - Hopefully the error was enlightening 🙂 Let me know if you have any further questions.

Best,

Mark

[michowl]

So, now that I've gotten thru the first condition (ODATA filter was missing ''s around the email value) I'm faced with another tricky situation. Within that I have a compose that get the id of the first user in the output array from the previous Dynamics Get Records. That's working fine. For run's 1-3 and 5 compose has empty outputs, but Run 4, compose works fine. The condition that follows is an advanced condition: "@not(empty(outputs('Compose')))" to verify that compose has an output before updating a record. But it looks like, from the error messages I see, that the condition is never even reached.

 

[michowl]

@masisley I think what may be happening is that the last condition limits the run of the dynamics action to 1 (because the rest are skipped. So it's trying to see the one run that ran (4) but it's only showing 1 run, so I tried to display the results for Run 1, not Run 4... if that makes sense. Could that be the issue?

[masisley · Accepted solution]

Interesting, I just reproed the same.

It seems like if any of the actions failed in the previous loop we won't run the next conditional. I think this is likely by design. I'm unfortunately not sure what to suggest here.

In your case did one of the first conditionals fail, or did they all succeed? And your second conditional is inside the same apply to each scope, correct?

[michowl · Accepted solution]

Nevermind, that is not the case. Ran it again with a Lead that would hit the first entry in the table.

Condition errored out?

If User Id is not empty

REASON

• Code
  ActionFailed
• Message
  An action failed. No dependent actions succeeded.

But the dependent action blames the condition

Assign Lead to User

Show run of 1

◀ PreviousNext ▶

REASON

• Code
  ActionDependencyFailed
• Message
  The execution of template action 'Assign_Lead_to_User' is skipped: dependant action 'If_User_Id_is_not_empty' completed with status 'Failed' and code 'NotSpecified'.

I added a compose to look at the output of the condition before the condition action and it returns true.

[michowl]

Figured it out. I was sending the wrong type for Owner Type. Should have been systemusers, not systemuser.

However, I must say that the error outputs are very misleading for that condition.

What I ended up doing was Filtering the array and just getting the value needed from the first item.

Changed by conditional checks to throw Flow termination actions rather than putting my subsequent actions within the condition.

[michowl]

@masisley 

At the end of the day yesterday, I figured that my only issue was the Dynamic Owner Type missing the 's'.

So I tried today to put the loop back together. Tested it with the department in the first row of the array, and that worked fine. Then I tested with the department in the 3rd row, and it again fails. So I think what you mentioned yesterday is true:

"if any of the actions failed in the previous loop we won't run the next conditional. I think this is likely by design."

I'm having a hard time understanding how this could possibly be by design. Could you escalate this as a bug?

[masisley]

@michowl, apologies for the delay in responding.

In my case, the flow I authored had a conditional defined that had a runAfter that looks like this:

"runAfter": {
    "Condition": [
        "Succeeded"
    ]
}

We don't currently expose a way for users to edit these run-after conditions so that you can run these after failure, but it's on our roadmap for the future.

Here's a look at what I did in my flow:

When I ran, though the designer displayed that my actions after the conditional failed to run, in actuality, I was receiving the push notification for the successful cases, and nothing in the failure cases. I think there's a designer bug in how it displays these (I should be able to scroll through each iteration with previous/next for both the push notification and Condition 2). I'll file a bug on this.

Your flow looks a little different than mine. Mine has all of the conditionals defined inside of an "Apply to each", so I'm not sure exactly what the case is for you. It may be that you're running on the succesful cases just like me and the designer is lying to you about what it did.

Best,

Mark

[michowl]

@masisley That may be so, that the cases are running successfully afterwards. I've already implemented my work around successfully and have moved onto another project. If the issue arises in a future flow, I'll have to test that out.

Thanks for your work investigating this, and I'd appreciate if the visual bug is escalated.