Restart failed flow

(Alexander) #1

Dear Community,
Sometimes I’m facing some random errors in flows, which I guess are just temporary exception.
My question is - do you have any suggestions - how to best handle restarting of failed flows?
Unfortunately the Flow doesn’t provide interaction with the failed event, so I guess there needs to be a timer embedded in the flows, which will trigger a restart flow if the flow fails to complete within a needed time.
Do you have any better ideas?

(Daniel Beckett) #2

Hi Alexander,

Are there any particular reasons that your flows are failing? It may be best if we look into resolving those first! :slight_smile:

Flows can be abandoned by using keywords like ‘quit’ or ‘bye’ but this is a manual input from the user. A problem with trying to automate an exit from a flow is that the flows are run through in sequence and as such each and every action must be executed or checked - if the flow never makes it to your restart action then it won’t be able to carry it out.

Any chance you could share a bit more information about your flow?

Thanks,
Dan

(Alexander) #3

Well, the most common error is for example “ESOCKETTIMEDOUT” when I’m using a web-hook to my service.
The whole Flow fails and I have no alert, that it failed nor can I restart it.
But there could be many mistakes I overlooked. For example I’m using Podio service and sometimes it returns me shuffled fields in output and the flow fails again.

So I need to have information that it failed. After all you post it to the Interaction stats, so why not to make an alert to a developer?

Here is an example of failed flow where I don’t understand the error:

2017-06-20_13-07-42.png1260×1478 109 KB

(Daniel Beckett) #4

Hi again Alexander,

Out of interest, have you seen our docs on the Podio service? Specifically the known issues section - if not, it could be worth running through the steps there.

Am I right in thinking that your Podio action in that screenshot is for update an item?

(Alexander) #5

Thank you. However the point of this whole thread is to understand how to handle failed flows, not to solve particular issues.
Im inclined to try to log a start of each flow in Google spreadsheet and log the finish of the flow.
If the flow has not updated the spreadsheet with Finish log within a reasonable time, then I’ll fire an email to the Flow to run the flow again. Hm?

(John Jackson) #6

This is something I’m pretty sure we’ll be fixing as soon as we can - I realise it’s a problem and needs a solution. Have you see the item on our roadmap? If not, please add your vote there.

I don’t think there are any workaround for the moment.

1 Like
(Andrew Catchpole) #7

was this flow restart implemented?