What is error handling?

No matter how pro you are at building automations, errors will occur during the execution of your scenarios. This mostly happens if a service is unavailable due to a failure, a service responds with unexpected data, or the validation of input data fails. You’ll run into common types of errors such as data errors, connection errors, module timeout errors, runtime errors, invalid configuration errors, and others. It’s important to note that if a module throws an error during the scenario execution and there are no error handling routes attached to the module, default error handling logic is executed. All of these errors can be mitigated with a variety of strategies and settings depending on your scenario build and needs. So tip number one to keep in mind is the connection test. Whenever you test using run once or activate a scenario, the Fusion system will first check that all connections on all modules are working correctly. If not, the scenario won’t even start to process bundles, which is great, because you won’t have partially processed information that you’ll then have to go back and rerun. Tool tip number two to keep in mind is that every scenario has default general error handling and every module can also have specific error handling applied using directives, but we’ll get into that in tool tip number three. If no error handling is applied to a module that errored, then subsequent modules are not executed. The scenario execution history is marked as an error and the scenario will likely be deactivated based upon the number of consecutive errors defined in your scenario settings. There’s a default of three consecutive errors across your entire scenario before the scenario is deactivated. If you do have a scenario that is stopped due to an error, you’ll want to evaluate the error in the scenario designer if you’re currently building and testing, or you can go into the execution history for your scenario to evaluate what error occurred, fix the error, and then choose how you want to proceed with reactivating your scenario. Luckily, Fusion remembers which records it processes, so you can generally turn your scenario back on and it’ll pick up where it left off. For tool tip number three, we’ll go beyond the defaults as we talk about error handling that you can build into your scenario design. To add specific error handling to a certain module or path, you can utilize error handling directives. These directives look like modules in your scenario, but are distinguished by the empty dotted line connecting them to a module. We’ll go deeper into directives in the next video. -