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Beware the question mark in Action names

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Posted on by Greg Prickril

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Got this publish error: Flow client error returned with status code "BadRequest" and details "InvalidOpenApiFlow".

No red marks. Nothing.

Had absentmindedly named a condition with a question mark (isSuccess?).

Took an hour to debug. Created copy and deleted stuff until it published.

#nightmare. Edit, as usual, was zero help.

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Building flows

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chiaraalina 2,040 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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I hit the same error, but for a different reason: multiple Respond to agent actions with different output schemas

Seems all responses need to match (same fields/types), otherwise you get this generic error.

Fixing the schema made it work.

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Expiscornovus 33,851 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @Greg Prickril,

The Power Automate interface used to return a more specific error message/code InvalidWorkflowRunActionName for these kind of errors. Might be good to report that back to Microsoft Power Automate support as well (in parallel to this thread). I agree, this generic error is not very helpful.

See the below for an example of the more granular error code
Flow save failed with code 'InvalidWorkflowRunActionName' and message 'The provided workflow run action name 'For_each_attachment?' has these invalid characters '?'. The name cannot contain any control characters or any of the following symbols: '"<", ">", "%", "&", "", "?", "/"'.'.

https://community.dynamics.com/blogs/post/?postid=3d93e9c3-0ef7-451b-b416-b5841e37a0dd

And below is my repro of your issue. Without any inner exception/just the generic error message.

Happy to help out 😁

I share more #PowerAutomate and #SharePointOnline content on my Blog, LinkedIn, Bluesky profile or Youtube Channel

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Greg Prickril 161 on at

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Just got it again! Had never seen it before today, so I think it is a change to the validation logic. This time, I changed a variable name but didn't change all references to it. Another 30 minutes wasted.

The editor is horrible at validation. So many errors that should be detected at publish time end up as runtime errors, e.g., misspelled functions! No excuse.

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David_MA 14,614 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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I rarely use the new designer because of its many idiosyncrasies. The classic designer will warn you if you name an action with certain characters:

It appears this rule applies to the new designer, but you don't get warned when saving the flow like with the old designer.

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Greg Prickril 161 on at

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I'm super confused about which is which. I thought the designer I'm using was old. That designer is hard to use for me. Way to much wasted horizonatal space. Anyway, I think it's a new validation error (a bug).

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