Announcing Public Preview of Resubmitting from an Action in Logic Apps Workflows
Introduction
Azure Logic Apps connects many disparate systems together and allows an organization to orchestrate business processes across those systems. The health and availability of these downstream systems is important in ensuring these automated business processes complete successfully and customers receive the value they seek from integrating these systems.
In the event a downstream system has an issue (error or availability), Logic Apps has the ability to retry a particular transaction. However, at some point, the workflow must declare an error so that operation analysts can further investigate the issue. Currently, an operations analyst can resume a transaction, however they must do so at the beginning of the workflow. This behavior creates some challenges as it can result in creating duplicate information in the system calls that occur before the action that failed.
To that end we are excited to announce the Private Preview of Resubmitting from an Action in Logic Apps! This feature seeks to provide customers with more control over how they resubmit failed transactions and avoiding data duplication or increasing new operational friction.
Background
Resubmit from trigger has been a feature available for many years, however customers are looking for more flexibility and being able to resubmit from any action within the workflow. This will give customers more control over where they resume their workflow from and will allow customers to avoid data duplication in action calls that previously were successful.
This is a long-standing request from Azure Logic Apps customers. Today, when customers encounter this situation, they generally over-engineer solutions to inject queuing systems in between workflows or they build ad hoc workflows to address operational needs.
How It Works
Once you select the action to be resubmitted, all actions before the selected action including the trigger are replayed from the original workflow run. This means we will reuse the inputs and outputs of those actions and not actually execute them. Once the workflow execution reaches the resubmitted action, we will process that action and all following actions as normal.
How to Use It
- Go to your workflow history page and select a run.
- The run must be in a completed state i.e., Failed or Successful
- Select the run you wish to resubmit.
- On the run history page right-click on an eligible action to show the menu.
- Click the Submit from this action button. The page will automatically refresh, putting you into the context of the new run. NOTE: Actions occurring before the resubmitted action will have a dim-green icon indicating their input/output was reused from the parent run.
Limitations
The resubmit feature is not available to all actions and workflow configurations currently. The following are the limitations for resubmit:
- The workflow must be created as Stateful.
- The workflow must be created as Standard.
- The new run will execute the same flow version as the resubmitted run.
- Only actions of sequential workflows are eligible to be resubmitted. Workflows with parallel paths are currently not supported.
- Actions inside of a Foreach or Until operations are not eligible to be resubmitted. Additionally, the Foreach and Until operations themselves are not eligible.
- Actions that occur after Foreach and Until operations are not eligible to be resubmitted.
- This feature is currently not available in VS Code or the Azure CLI.
What's Next
This initial release is available for Standard workflows inside the Azure portal. We will also be making this feature available for Consumption workflows and available in VS Code soon as well. We’re excited to get your feedback so please give it a try and let us know your thoughts!