Azure cannot save a Logic App. Notification indicates "Saving logic app" for over 1 hour. All editor buttons disabled.

Question

Azure cannot save a Logic App. Notification indicates "Saving logic app" for over 1 hour. All editor buttons disabled.

Tim Dutcher 36

Within a Resource Group, I created a Logic App, built it out and noticed in the portal (in Notifications) the message "Saving logic app...". It has now been over 1 hour and it still has the same notification. Meanwhile, all buttons on the toolbar in the Logic App editor are disabled, so I can't even get to the source code to preserve my work. At this point, it appears that all of my work on the Logic App is lost. The question is how and why this happens and what can be done to help Azure successfully save Logic Apps?

Tim Dutcher 36 Reputation points

2021-06-04T20:16:18.147+00:00

I ran into this again today. The same Logic App has been saving for nearly 15 minutes as a I write this and the Azure Portal notifications section shows that the same Logic App is saving three times. I noticed that the Logic Apps team updated the designer UI, and it looks nice, but if users can't save changes in the middle of their work then shouldn't that be a higher priority for the team to focus on?

4 answers

Your answer

Tim Dutcher 36 Reputation points

2021-06-04T20:16:18.147+00:00

I ran into this again today. The same Logic App has been saving for nearly 15 minutes as a I write this and the Azure Portal notifications section shows that the same Logic App is saving three times. I noticed that the Logic Apps team updated the designer UI, and it looks nice, but if users can't save changes in the middle of their work then shouldn't that be a higher priority for the team to focus on?

Answer 1

Tim Dutcher 36

Tim Dutcher 36 Reputation points

2021-03-18T18:48:50.31+00:00

In looking at the problematic Logic App again, notice that "Microsoft.EmptyWorkflow" is part of the path to it. After I created it (from a Resource Group), I clicked to deployment button to navigate to the new resource. From there, I started working on the Logic App. It successfully created several connections as I worked on the app, but after about 30 minutes of working on it I noticed the "Saving logic app" message and that it was trying to save for 30 minutes. As I write this, the "saving" message is still in the notifications list and it's been nearly 3 hours. So, could it be that the problem is that when I navigated to the Logic App initially it was not linked somehow to the Resource Group from where I created it?

Answer 2

Mike Urnun 9,856 Microsoft Employee

Hello @Tim Dutcher - Thank you for posting here on MS Q&A about your recent experience! And we are sorry to hear about the inconvenience. It sounds like a front-end UX glitch due to a hanging networking call between the browser and Azure..are you hitting this issue consistently or too frequently? please share with us the relevant details and we'd happy to reproduce & investigate.

Save operation shouldn't really take that long though, and if it starts taking longer than a few mins, I'd stop waiting and start over. I also found it easier to get in the habit of hitting save after every small change, it seems to help keep the connections active. You can put together all kinds of workflows (that otherwise would take a long time developing in code-based experiences) in the designer mode in Azure Portal very quickly but when working on a production or mission-critical workflow, it'd be better to work in Visual Studio or VS Code, and maybe introduce version control and an automated CI/CD deployment as needed.

Tim Dutcher 36 Reputation points

2021-03-19T16:51:31.76+00:00

Thanks for the tips Mike. From now on, I'll make sure that I'm able to save before getting too far with the build. When I ran into the glitch you mentioned, I was under a fixed timeframe to build it out and I used all of my allotted time on the first pass. That's why I chose to wait for the save to possibly complete because I had to move on to other projects and didn't have the approval to spend time starting over.

As for the glitch, perhaps the portal should verify that the Logic App is being created in a location to which it can be saved. In this case, I created it from a resource group and clicked the option to navigate to the resource. I agree that it appears to be a timing issue.
Tim Dutcher 36 Reputation points

2021-03-19T16:51:41.987+00:00

I appreciate the tip on using VS. I work in the consulting world, so establishing CI/CD is dependent on my client's staff because they will ultimately need to take over the projects. In a lot of cases, our clients don't have any developers, so CI/CD is a non-starter. But they often have people who can make adjustments to a flow in a visual editor (i.e., Azure portal Logic Apps editor). So I think it's important for the Logic Apps team to make sure that experience is reliable as well.
Koppalai 1 Reputation point

2021-04-27T10:17:16.017+00:00

I have that same issue with one logic apps when I try to add create blob. After adding that action saving is hanging and won't save. I can choose folder nicely so the connection is working but something is with that...I could add other actions but not that one.

Answer 3

Marc Fellman 1

I ran into the same issue last week. Never noticed the saving taking long but just that it forgot a lot of my changes. It is work I do for another organization than the one to which my MSDN account is registered to.

Answer 4

Marc Fellman 1

Hmmm, just found a way to reproduce in my logic app.
I have 2 nested for eaches. And in the second one I moved a set variable a few steps and saved it while setting the value to empty. It complaines that the value can not be empty and stays in saving mode. So the "buttons" stay disabled. You can still edit the Logic App in the GUI but no longer save (or switch to the code view for that matter).

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Azure cannot save a Logic App. Notification indicates "Saving logic app" for over 1 hour. All editor buttons disabled.

4 answers

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