Error Handling

The 'Populate Excel' engine provides a configuration option named 'Inline Errors' which controls how errors are reported. The 'Inline Errors' configuration option is set to 'Yes' by default, whereby any errors are added to the relevant worksheet as opposed to the action execution failing and an exception reported.

If an error occurs during execution the flow will execute successfully:

The detail of the error is contained within the relevant worksheet:

The error message is stating there is an issue processing the companyName token, for this example an invalid token configuration was passed to generate the error:

When changing the 'Inline Errors' configuration option to 'No' the action execution will fail when an error occurs.

NOTE: You may wish to disable automatic retries before setting the 'Inline Errors' configuration option to 'No' 

The details of the actual error are contained within the body of the output, i.e. the information returned by the Encodian action, see below:

The complete error:

{
   "error": {
     "code": 502,
      "source": "xxx.azure-apihub.net",
      "clientRequestId": "xxx",
      "message": "BadGateway",
      "innerError": {
         "HttpStatusCode": 500,
         "HttpStatusMessage": "An error occurred processing the request",
         "OperationId": null,
         "Errors": [
            "The following error occurred populating the Excel file provided: An error has been encountered at the end of expression 'companyName>>'. Unexpected end of expression."
          ],
         "OperationStatus": "Error",
         "Filename": null,
         "FileContent": null
      }
   }
}

Optimizing Error Handling - Solution Building

Whilst building your solution we recommend keeping 'Inline Errors' configuration option set to 'Yes' which instructs the population error not to throw an exception but to add the error message to the output file.

Optimizing Error Handling - Disable Retries

Whilst solution building and when setting the 'Inline Errors' configuration option to 'No' , we recommend disabling Power Automate's default retry policy. By default, when an error occurs Power Automate will automatically execute the same request 8 times before an error is reported which can lead to excessive wait times whilst your are building your flow.

This configuration will ensure that your flow execution will fail much more quickly, allowing you to validate any errors via the errors collection returned by the Encodian action.

Execution time with the standard retry policy:

Execution time with the standard retry policy disabled: