Learning to be a superhero by debugging your flows
Microsoft Flow is a truly powerful product enabling you to build automation using all sorts of apps from SharePoint Online and Email to Dynamics CRM and Twitter. But with great power, comes great responsibility. I’m Merwan Hade, your friendly neighborhood Program Manager from the Microsoft Flow team and I’m going to walk you through how you can quickly debug your flows so that you know just how awesome your new superpowers are.
Let’s create a flow that sends an email whenever a new file is added to a Dropbox folder. To make things easier, you can just start from this premade template. Once you open the page, click Use this template.
Enter your credentials and click Continue.
Now enter in a folder path for Dropbox (e.g. /flowhere) and add a Body and recipients for your email.
Now that the flow has been authored, to see it in action, click Create Flow.
Once your flow is saved, to see it in action, perform the starting action. In this case, you’re going to upload a file (e.g. Superhero.jpg) to the flowhere folder.
Notice how you can now see the results of your flow run. Click on an individual step to see its inputs and outputs.
Need to make a tweak? Simply click Edit Flow and make your changes. Ready for more action? Click Done.
Debugging your flows
A few weeks later, you notice that you aren’t getting any emails about files being uploaded to the flowhere folder in Dropbox. Something’s wrong…but never fear for Flow is here. Head on over to the My flows page to see your flow history.
Find your flow and click on the (i)
Now select the last failed run to see exactly where it failed and why.
This brings up a view with each step of the flow and where the failure occurred. In this case, you see an HTTP 404 telling you the specified folder doesn’t exist.
You head over to Dropbox and notice that the flowhere folder was in fact deleted and someone created a new folder called flowhereandnow with the same contents. Let’s re-point our flow to this new folder. Head back to the My flows page, select your flow and click the Edit button.
Enter in new folder path for Dropbox (/flowhereandnow) and click Update flow. Problem solved. Up, up, and away! Have feedback? Please engage with us on the community, or, follow me on Twitter @merwanhade
