Sporadic error with "Add a row into a table" after weeks of running fine. Error 403 - Issue with permissions

[JNicholl]

I have a flow that takes a response to a form submission and inserts it into an Excel sheet.

This has been running without issue for the past few weeks up until this morning where a series of flows failed in a row for:

{
"status": 403,
"message": "The user doesn't have permissions to open the workbook in edit mode. Please fix your permissions and try again.\r\n"
"error": {
"message": "The user doesn't have permissions to open the workbook in edit mode. Please fix your permissions and try again."
},
"source": "excelonline-eus2.azconn-eus2.p.azurewebsites.net"
}

and then started running fine again. Does anyone have any ideas on what may have caused this?

[v-duann-msft]

Hi @JNicholl 

Thanks for your reply.

According to your description, your flow using excel online connector got failed from time to time and could recover by itself. May I know whether this excel file managed by multiple people? As it may cause such kind of permission issue in excel if multiple users access or edit data at the same time.

Meanwhile, since I couldn’t reproduce this issue from my end so it’s hard to tell the root cause. But I found some similar scenarios, the temp failure was caused due to unstable excel online (business)connector. Thus, we recommend to create exactly same flow and disable the older one to see whether issue persists.

I will keep an eye on this case for next few days. If you still get same error from time to time, please kindly let me know.

Here is the related similar case for your reference :

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Connecting-To-Data/Flow-stopped-working-after-months-403-Error-w...

Hope the content above may help you.

Thanks

Anna

[JNicholl]

The excel file is managed my only 1 person (myself) and was not in use during the timeframes of the error.

The issue is still persisting and still sporadic - with 10 flows running fine, then 1-3 failing, then running fine again -- all with the same error.

I don't like the solution of inactivating and recreating the flow as not only does it make it difficult to "re-do" the failed flows, but it's also not a "good" solution long-term.

[v-duann-msft]

Hi @JNicholl 

Thank you very much for your update.

Since the issue is still happening but the flow works fine in most time period. I believe there is no problem with you flow settings. Thus, could you please help to compare limitations of excel connector ?

Please kindly check known issue and limitations as well as throttling limits as I found the flow runs quite frequently. We can add 100 records into excel within 1 min per connection.  

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/excelonlinebusiness/

Hope to hear from you soon.

Thanks

Anna

[JNicholl]

The only one I can see there that has any possibility of causing is "An Excel file may be locked for an update for up to 6 minutes since the last use of the connector".

However, the same error has occurred with almost 2 hours between between successive runs.

Per the throttling comment: the max amount of times it has ran in a minute is 5 - and that was with me re-submitting the flows and it functioned without issue.

[JNicholl]

More of the previous 403 error in a row last night before it fixed itself:

However, this morning there was a new error that was present for a 4 runs before, again, fixing itself:

Error from token exchange: Runtime call was blocked because connection has error status: Enabled| Error, and microsoftforms is in the block list. Connection errors: [ParameterName: token, Error: Code: Unauthorized, Message: 'Failed to refresh access token for service: aadcertificate. Correlation Id=4b529da9-c503-42dc-8a48-a040389ab46c, UTC TimeStamp=1/26/2021 11:36:01 AM, Error: Failed to acquire token from AAD: An internal error occurred.
']

From looking around the forum the general consensus was that this was caused by having MFA enabled. However, the account that runs these flows does not have MFA enabled, and again, fixed itself without intervention & re-submitting the forms works without error.

This is maddening.