You can enable the Error Handling option for an Action. Enabling error handling will allow you to continue executing workflow in a multi-step workflow, even if one of the steps or the entire Action fails.
If Error Handling is enabled, a workflow will continue executing and the status will always be Success even though one of the actions failed.
If Error Handling is disabled, a workflow stops at the node or action that failed to execute and the workflow status will be shown as Failed.
NOTE: The Error Handling option is available only for Actions and not for Conditions.
As soon as you enable Error Handling for an action, you’ll see that all the action nodes below are moved under two new Condition nodes called Success and Failed.
NOTE: You’ll not be able to edit the Success and Failed Condition nodes, but you will be able to view them. Also, you’ll be able to add more nodes under the Success and Failed Condition nodes and not between the action node and its associated Success/Failed Condition nodes.
The Success and Failed nodes ensure that when the respective action gets executed successfully, the nodes under the Success node get executed and when the respective action fails, the nodes under the Failed condition get executed.
Overall, the workflow automation status will be shown as Success even if the action for which error handling is enabled fails, while all other nodes after that action get executed successfully.
When you enable Error Handling for an action, you can determine the nodes after that action that fail during execution This will be represented by the total number of errors during the test-run of the workflow using the Test option.
You can disable Error Handling for an action node when the workflow is not linked with a dialog.
However, disabling Error Handling does not delete the Success and Failed nodes associated with that action node. You’ll have to manually delete the Success and Failed nodes.
Click the Delete icon for the desired node and click Yes in the confirmation pop-up.
Also, you won’t be able to add new nodes between an action and its associated Success and Failed Nodes. Whenever you enable Error Handling for an action, the workflow builder will check and create a new Success/Failed condition node depending on whichever node is absent.
You can add the deleted node again by clicking on the Action node and clicking the checkbox of the node you deleted under Error Handling.
In this case, the Failed node was deleted, so we can bring back the node by clicking the checkbox for it.
NOTE: Outputs of only the previous nodes that got executed successfully will be available as inputs for a new node in the Variable Picker pop up.
As you can see from the image below, since the Send Email action was a Success, the output variables from all the previous action nodes (Create Group and Send Email) are available as input in the Variable Picker for the new action.
You can also add a new Action node for the Failed node.
As you can see from the image, since the send email action failed, the output variables from the failed action nodes (Send Email) won’t be available as input on the variable picker for the new action.
NOTE: Before enabling error handling for an action node, determine whether that action has less impact on its related chatbot dialog.
In a nutshell, here is an example to understand Error Handling.
Let us say that there are two actions inside a workflow for creating a group in Office 365 – one for creating the group and the other for sending an email to the admin if the group gets created successfully.
We can enable Error Handling for sending an email action since it has less impact on the overall workflow and we can ignore it when it fails to execute. The main action here is creating a group in Office 365 and we cannot enable Error Handling for it.