Ajay is a developer

Problem Statement

You want to raise an error in the Power Automate Desktop Flow which needs to be caught within the flow.

Potential Solutions

There are several ways to raise an exception in a Power Automate Desktop flow. A clean and effective approach is to use the Stop Flow action. This action allows you to specify how the flow should terminate, with two options: Successfully or With Error Message. Choosing the With Error Message option will signal the calling flow to treat this as an error, enabling proper exception handling in your automation.

However, one downside of using the Stop Flow action is that if you have error-handling logic defined within the flow, it will not be executed. This blog post explores how to handle such scenarios effectively and discusses various approaches for raising exceptions in Power Automate Desktop flows.

1. Raise an Exception with a Script

Power Automate Desktop supports multiple scripting languages, including VBScript, JavaScript, PowerShell, Python, and .NET Script. Using any of these, you can raise an exception programmatically. Additionally, you can pass variables as exception messages to provide more context about the error. Here’s an example of how this can be implemented:

2. Trigger an Exception with an Invalid Step

Another method is to deliberately run an invalid step, such as:

• Referencing a variable that hasn’t been initialized.
• Performing an operation like division by zero.

While this approach can force an exception, it is less elegant because the resulting error message will not be meaningful or descriptive. Instead, it will reflect the error caused by the invalid step, making debugging more difficult. step.