Pipeline 'X' cannot have cycles

Question

I'm trying to validate my pipeline and am getting the above error. This seems to be new behaviour as I've only begun to see this in the last week. Any suggestions? Not exactly sure what this even means. It takes me to the offending portion of the pipeline, which is a for each.

Answer 1

Hello @DaveOdom-3327,
Thanks for the question and using MS Q&A platform.

As we understand the ask here is an explanation of "Pipeline cannot have cycles".

A cycle is activities connected in such a way that it goes in a circle or loop. If you follow the connection lines, you eventually end up where you start. This is a cycle, like a wheel on a bicycle. Picture below

The problem with this, is you could make an activity run more than once, and the pipeline would never end, continuing again and again. So, to protect both your wallet and our computers, we disallow such endless behavior. The validator checks for this sort of cycle, as well as execute pipeline trying to call itself, and variables assigning to itself.

Since the UI is highlighting a for each, maybe the offending portion is inside the for each, as child activities?

Does this help?

Please do let me if you have any queries.

Thanks
Martin

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Answer 2

This is what is in this particular pipeline. There are two foreaches, but it wouldn't create a loop. One foreach looks at rows with a certain criteria, the other diff criteria. If i remove the copy ForEach, then it validates. Another thing I've noticed, is I receive this error even if I clone then entire pipeline..though that may be something else.

Answer 3

Ok, not sure why, but I duplicated the pipeline, made the same changes to add the second ForEach and now this one validates just fine...not exactly sure why. I looked at the JSON and they look identical. Not very helpful in determining, but maybe if others have a similar issue, try duplicating the pipeline without the changes, then make the changes in the new pipeline and see if it's just something odd in the original?!

Thanks for looking at this.