Error Handling with Function Libraries in Flow

As the final episode of the Function Library pattern in Flow I’m going to look at error handling. Before I go any further please do review the following posts:

• Function Libraries in Microsoft Flow – the basics
• Function Libraries in Microsoft Flow – Calling multiple functions
• Microsoft Flow – Implementing a Try, Catch , Finally in a flow

Handling failing actions

During the development of a flow you will find many actions can fail for many different reasons. During the development you might not even have considered certain failures

In the app that I developed in the first 2 parts of this series I included a divide function branch. Of course I didn’t think that someone could try to divide numbers by 0 and my flow failed:

Try Catch Pattern

I decided to add my try catch pattern to the function library pattern. I could now build the try catch around the whole flow however that means that I would only know that one of the functions called has failed but I wouldn’t know which one or in which manner.

With the following construction I added my error handling on the divide steps

Wow, this is good, now I can collect the errors that happened in an Error variable. Ok, this pattern here is a bit simplified. I could do a lot more, but I don’t want to over complicate things at this stage. I could for example imagine that you want to handle some errors as critical (i.e. end the flow) and some other error message you might want to just ignore.

Also if you have for example REST API calls to SharePoint you might want to collect the error message returned by the output from these actions.

Reporting errors back to users

Now that I’ve got an error message to report there is just one step left to complete. Report it back to the user.

With a small change to my flow and I’m reporting the error back to the app.

Now when the user tried to submit an invalid division, I can report the flow error back to the user