Power Automate - Re-Establish Connection
At the most basic level, you need three things:
- Scopes
- Run After
- Send an email
Here are the steps:
1. Make two scopes and put all your flow steps into the first Scope. The only real exceptions here are Initialize Variables and the Flow's trigger, neither of which can go into a scope--you can ignore these steps. As for naming the Scopes, that is up to you and it technically doesn't matter; however, most people will refer to this as "Try" and "Catch". Your flow should now look similar to below:
2. Click the ellipses (...) for the second Scope > click "Configure run after" > uncheck "is successful" and check "has failed" > click Done. It should look like this:
You will now notice a red arrow between the two steps. That indicates a different "run after", which is what you want.
3. Finally, within the second Scope add your error handling steps. At minimum, I recommend two things: A) Send an email, and B) Terminate (set it to "Failed").
3A) The email should go to the flow's owner, and the subject should be something that (presumably) you will recognize. Feel free to customize this any way you want.
But the most important part is the code below. This code will create a link which will take you to the flow that failed. This saves tons of time! To add the code: Click into the Send an email's "Body" field > in the popup, click "Expression" > paste the code as-is > click OK.
concat('https://emea.flow.microsoft.com/manage/environments/', workflow()['tags']['environmentName'], '/flows/', workflow()['name'], '/runs/', workflow()['run']['name'])3B) Finally, add a "Terminate" step, and set it to "Failed" ("Cancelled" will also work, but I personally use "Cancelled" for other operations). You really want to do this, otherwise whenever a flow fails, it will show up as "Succeeded" because your second Scope executed successfully. This will obviously be really confusing when you start to investigate your flows.
Here is an overview of the full set-up:
TIPS
- The "Terminate" steps needs to be the FINAL step in the Scope. As soon as Power Automate runs that step, the flow will fully end, and anything after that step will be ignored. It is for this reason I actually use "Terminate" to help test flows in smaller chunks.
- "Terminate" cannot be added to an Apply to Each loop.
- You can add a bunch of steps to the second Scope. For example, in my more complex flows I have things like Conditions to delete items from SharePoint if there is an error--this helps avoid duplicate entries and unnecessary extra files. Example:
- EDIT: One last tip. When adding multiple steps to your error handling scope, the "Send an email" should be the first real step. Looking at the image above, let's pretend something goes wrong with the "Update item - Process Fail - Job Started (No)" step. In that case, I wouldn't get the notification email, and so would assume everything was okay. Always send the email first, then try to clean up the mess!
I have found ArcGIS connectors unreliable -- lots of authentication errors in the middle of hundreds of other successful runs. This is a separate issue from the 2-week re-authentication issue.
I have changed my use of ArcGIS connector actions to using HTTP GET or POST actions using ArcGIS REST API instead. I'm not sure if this is possible for your workflows but I found it to be more reliable. This relies on getting an AGOL token first to use in the API call. The query output body has a "features" array that contains one or more features (if your query where clause had a match).
Get AGOL token child flow (I use the Solution feature of Power Automate so I can run child flows and have a migration pipeline from a development/test to production environment. Lemme know if you're curious about that). But this all that the child flow is doing -- another API call to get AGOL token:
The actual query API call
Compose attributes of the first result. Or you could do a For Each... action and do something with each feature if you expect to return more than 1.
