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Flow intermittently failing on Excel online (Business) - add a row function - Previously worked for months without issue

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Posted on by Gary7

Hi,

I have a long standing flow that has worked fine for months however from 15th January onwards, it has started intermittently failing. If it does fail, it always fails at the point of adding a row to excel, the rest works fine. If it does fail, I can press to 'resubmit' the flow and most of the time it then works with identical data. Even when the flow says it has failed, sometime the row has been added in Excel, sometimes the same row has been added multiple times (I presume because its retrying a couple of times in the flow). The error message I get is 'Bad gateway' on the Excel Online (Business) connector and the precise error is below. The flow it's self hasn't been edited for months and 75% of the time it does still work, but for some reason in the last week, around 25% of the time it fails.

Is this a known issue with the Excel connector or could anyone offer any insight to what it might be?

Thank you!

{

"error": {

"code": 504,

"source": "flow-apim-europe-001-northeurope-01.azure-apim.net",

"clientRequestId": "feea6a43-e549-42d6-a3c6-afb5c7b42827",

"message": "BadGateway",

"innerError": {

"status": 504,

"message": "Request to Graph API has timed out.\r\nclientRequestId: feea6a43-e549-42d6-a3c6-afb5c7b42827\r\nserviceRequestId: db68cd78-bbb9-443d-aaeb-3af976399f50;d299b60b-d801-45b5-9517-13473e50ab57;1953a001-8c61-4c26-83b9-297ebb0e166d;19e1c34d-10fe-44fa-9376-7af0d2dc7f9b",

"error": {

"message": "Request to Graph API has timed out."

"source": "excelonline-ne.azconn-ne-002.p.azurewebsites.net"

}

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Ethan_009 4,838 Moderator on at

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Hi @Gary7 ,

If your action is getting TimedOut then go to its setting by clicking on ellipses (3 dots) and configure your Retry Policy.

As you say that when you trigger again it works, then set a 5 min retry policy which will re-trigger itself so run itself again in-case of bad response.

Also, if you have completed 'X' number of rows, you can either mark a column indicating that next run should not include those rows and move to next rows. This can be used to avoid re-iterating with same rows and data.

Hope this helps

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Gary7 2 on at

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Hi Ethan,

Thanks very much for the response. I had looked at that but the retry policy is on default which seems to be 4 attempts already. When this started happening, I did change the flow after this point to run if failed, so currently it gets to this point, tries 4 times and then carries on with the flow. A lot of the time, each retry adds the same information to the excel sheet so its not actually failing even though it says it is.

It's just really strange that it started happening all of a sudden. Its worked hundred of times for months without an issue. I thought may be it must be to do with the size of the excel sheet, but its only 1500 lines and it's adding a row rather than retrieving data. Interestingly earlier in the flow it does retrieve data from a tab on the same spreadsheet and that works fine.

Thanks,

Gary

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Ethan_009 4,838 Moderator on at

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Hi @Gary7 ,

I see, working with excel may get tricky at times.

You can retrieve more rows or extract them by using Pagination in the Excel Action settings itself. With Pagination, you can get way more rows than usual. Do check out limits but ideally it won't have issues for 5000/10000 rows.

Also, I'd suggest you 2 advancements to handle with Excel

1. Keep a column which you can use later to fetch records if error happens. (Meaning if error happens on 490th row and you have max 500 rows, then your flow can re-trigger and resume from 490th row instead of doing all records.

2. You can make Parent-Child flow which you can send 'skip row count' as parts by parts and complete several actions in parts, can get tricky but it works in many cases. [If you are trying, begin with parallel processing]

Although I'm not sure why responses fails or timeout but I've handled this as suggested above.

Hope this helps

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