I have a pipeline with a single ForEach activity which consists of one Copy activity. This ForEach activity usually iterates over seven items. Now and then one of ForEach inner Copy activities fails but not the ForEach activity itself. This makes entire pipeline to be set with a "Succeeded" status. Is this behavior expected or this is a bug? Thanks! Pic to illustrate the problem:

currently For each activity doesn't care if inner activities failed or successful. No, it does! :) It seems that my problem lies with inner Copy activity failing to retry itself and being left in a bizarre state which is ignored by ForEach activity when deciding in what state it ended.

"Ability to fail ForEach if any inner activity fail" should be taken as improvement. In my opinion, currently For each activity doesn't care if inner activities failed or successful. You can post this as a feedback (link given in below similar issue) Please see similar issue reported - On Failure Activity Reporting Overall Success =============================================== If the response helped, do " Accept Answer " and upvote it -- Vaibhav

ForEach inner activity fails but not ForEach activity itself!

Accepted answer

Andris Veidemanis 96 Reputation points

2020-08-10T13:01:28.357+00:00

currently For each activity doesn't care if inner activities failed or successful.

No, it does!

:)

It seems that my problem lies with inner Copy activity failing to retry itself and being left in a bizarre state which is ignored by ForEach activity when deciding in what state it ended.
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Jeff Ramos 6 Reputation points

2020-08-12T14:37:35.913+00:00

I have also seen this exact same behavior on IfCondition activities. It's definitely not consistent. Sometimes an inner failure causes a failure of the parent activity, and sometimes it does not. Sorry this does not address the original question, but I just wanted to point out that it seems to be related to any nested activity rather than specific to the ForEach. In addition to that, I'd like to point out that even if the inner failure is caught and handled by another activity run from the OnFailure (red arrow) mechanism, the parent activity can still be reported as failed. I agree that if there is an unhandled inner failure the parent activity should also consistently fail, but I would like to see the option to catch the failure intentionally and have the parent activity return successful. Either way, the inconsistent reporting (especially false Success) is particularly troubling and problematic.

nweinric 6 Reputation points

2022-05-11T20:32:36.397+00:00

I can't belive this issue doesn't get more attention. Sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds?! This is what i am finding as well. This needs fixed. Also, would be great if we had the option to raise an error(fail an activity ourselves).

MartinJaffer-MSFT 26,026 Reputation points

2022-05-31T16:43:17.803+00:00

Hello @nweinric . Please allow me to explain what is going on.

There is a nuanced logic to whether an overall pipeline is marked as success or failure.

A pipeline fails when:

the last activity in the pipeline fails

When there is a success dependency, and that path is not taken

The For Each and If activity can be treated like mini-pipelines in this logic.

This allows you to make error-handling logic without failing the entire pipeline. For example, your data source has a mirror, and sometimes one goes down, and you want it to try the mirror when that happens so you don't fail.

So if you have a failing activity, and that has an on-failure dependency (which succeeds), the overall situation is success.

However if you have both success and failure dependencies, the overall situation is failure

Completion dependencies and do not contribure to the failure criteria like the success dependencies. The following three do not make overall failure.

This logic is by design.
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ForEach inner activity fails but not ForEach activity itself!

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