Troubleshooting flow: Can't Expand Loop

[Anonymous]

One of my users is reporting that a Loop Until condition isn't being satisfied, even though they're sure they're adding the information it's looking for. The problem is, when I pull up the running flow and click on the loop, it's not expanding. How can I examine the parameters of each step inside the loop if I can't expand the loop to examine them?

Loop won't expand when I look into the running flow:

Here is what the loop looks like expanded in the flow editor:

[v-yuazh-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

Yes, we couldn't expand the loop when the loop is on running.

If you want to expand the loop to examine them, you could wait until the flow is finished or the loop is finished.

Best regards,

Alice

[Anonymous]

If a loop runs until a condition is satisfied, the user is convinced the condition is satisfied, but it’s still looping, how am I supposed to troubleshoot the actions inside the loop to determine why the conditions are not being satisfied?

[Anonymous]

This is still a HUGE debugging issue. I have a flow that simply has not kicked off a function inside a loop.

Here's what that looks like:

I'd LOVE to examine the steps inside that loop to determine what's going on, but when I click the loop, it doesn't expand.

Here's what's inside that loop:

I need to be able to expand the loop so I examine that aproval step to determine WHY it's not sending the approval. But I can't. Because someone made the decision that loops can't be opened for troubleshooting running flows.

That's VERY frustrating!

[Anonymous]

I agree that this is a huge debugging issue. You are also unable to see the results if you manually cancel a flow while the loop is running. You are only able to view the contents of the loop if it is succesful which completely eliminates the possibility to debug it when necessary. I ran a loop for over an hour without the result I expected and was unable to debug it because of this limitation. After this failure I had to add an email notification and re-run the loop in order to debug it. This flow has schedule limitations which also required me to restructure the entire flow to make it work around those limitations. Over all this debugging limitation created hours worth of extra work for something that took me 5 minutes to debug in the end.

[nicolasdb]

Totally agree with that. Call me crazy but wasn't it possible to inspect a running loop before? In any case, at least, I would be important to be able to inspect it when we cancel the execution if it's not possible while it's running. That's a HUGE problem for us too.

[PeanutRhombus]

Did you ever find a solution to this? I'm currently experiencing the same issue

[Francis]

Same here. Impossible to debug!

[mpkorich]

I've been able to debug my loops using a "debug array" variable and appending strings with variable values throughout the loop. This array is saved to a sharepoint file (logfile.txt) 

This results in a logfile.txt (which was not formatted as I thought it would but I got the point).

Logfile below:

The Createfile action is a simple join on all the strings in your "buffer array".

This is a hacked debug logfile but you will have visibility into your loops now.

-M 

[Anonymous]

Simply dropping a reply to add voice to this issue. I've also encountered this issue and been immensely frustrated by it. In addition, it seems numerous previous posts have mentioned running into this issue in relation to trying to debug starting/waiting for approvals, which is also my case. 

[mecartistronico]

Three and a half years since the first post and MS still doesn't think it's important. 😞

[DrJDBB]

I think I have worked out how to ensure you can debug a failing loop. 

1. Ensure that there is an action immediately after the loop. 

2. Set the 'Configure Run After' settings for the above action (in 3 dot menu) to run after all scenarios - ie check all available boxes.

I believe that as long as an action following the loop can run successfully, then the loop can be expanded to determine which steps are failing.  

[AgulloBernatAnt]

DrJDBB I don't think this is accurate

at least that's not how it behaves on my end

[gbeall78]

A couple of things to assist with troubleshooting are:

1. Add a limit and timeout to the loop.
2. Ensure that any incrementing values (or whatever is helping to control the loop breaking) is set to run after fail, etc

This may help it fail faster so you can then get into it.

You can also put an action in there that will fail e.g. a list rows with a bad filter to act as a 'breakpoint'

[VictorV]

I have found if I:

1. add a Terminate action after the "Do Until" and
2. set all the "Should run after" including "has timed out"
3. set the "Do until" timeout to 5minutes (PT5M)
4. set the "Do until" count to just more than what i know is the iteration count, e.g. I used a small set of data (i.e. 4 iterations) so I reduced the count to 50.

this allows me to expand the Do Until and see where the loop is failing. For some reason if I have the timeout to 10minutes it would not let me expand the Do Until.