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Tips for easier debugging (especially web automations)

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

Does anybody have any tips that might speed up / simplify debugging a PAD flow? Currently, when an error occurs, the flow stops and exits debug mode. If you want to retry the offending action, you have to re-run large parts of the overall flow.

In my case, where the first step is to launch the automation browser and log in, I have to run my entire flow from the beginning to just to get that BrowserInstance variable again to be used later on. As a debugging workaround, I could try attaching to an existing browser just while debugging but (1) it's a crappy workaround and (2) I'm using the "Automation browser" which, unlike the other browsers, doesn't have the attach option.

Regardless of my particular case of web automation, in general it would be a huge improvement in developer experience to be able to re-run steps from a certain action without leaving the debug mode. Is this something that is in the works at Microsoft? It would be linked to this other idea regarding editing actions while debugging.

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Power Automate Desktop

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MichaelAnnis 5,727 Moderator on at

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I wish this was an option. If they can do it for Excel VBA, you would think they could do it for this, but not yet. I have done attach options during the middle of my flows in order to be able to do what you are talking about. For variables in general, you can have an error flow which sends all active variables out to environmental variables, and then have a debug flow that you can add to the beginning of whereever you are trying to troubleshoot from that pulls all those variables back in, but there are no great solutions.

I run all my flows attended, so another thing I like to do is have an On Error Block that just goes to an Error subflow which is a single display message displaying the error and it is basically asking me to fix it if I can. I make notes on where it errored out, so I can fix it later, but otherwise, I do what it needs (manually) to get back on track, so I don't have to start the flow over.

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Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Thanks for the reply. Regarding web stuff, seems like I'll have to switch over to Edge or Chrome and sprinkle an 'attach to browser' here and there. The variables to env variables to variables flow is an interesting idea, I might look into that. Ideally Microsoft will be improving the software to avoid having to do these things but I suppose it'll do for now.

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