The Auto Error Step
Workflows that contain one or more automatic steps contain an Auto Error step. The Auto Error step must have at least one assignee, who is the person to notify when an error occurs in an automatic action. The set of assignees must cover all the locales in which you work. Normally, the Auto Error step is assigned to an administrator.
The Auto Error step can react to any sort of error. For example, the error can be a runtime exception. Or, the automatic action, itself, might be programmed to check for errors and issue helpful error messages, should an error occur.
- The Redo option retries the failed step that caused the task to be assigned to the Auto Error step.
- The Cancel option cancels the task and sends the task to the Cancel step.
The Auto Error step does not support explicit transitions; there cannot be any explicit transitions into or out of the Auto Error step. Implicitly, there is a transition from the Auto Error step to the Cancel step (in the event of cancellation), from every automatic step in the system to the Auto Error step (in event of an error), and then back to each automatic step in the system (in the event of Redo).
- Choosing the
Redotransition will attempt to cancel the step again; it will re-run the Cancel automatic action again, and also attempt to cancel the task. Similar to other automatic actions, this action will be re-executed by choosing this Auto Error transition. - Choosing the
Canceltransition will attempt to cancel the step again, but with this option the automatic action will not be re-run again. It will cancel the task without re-running the automatic action. Similar to other automatic actions, the action will not be re-executed by choosing this Auto Error transition. This is an important option because if the same automatic action keeps on failing repeatedly, this option can be used to override this and simply cancel the task.
For tasks on Auto Error which transitioned there from a prior task cancellation, canceling them again using the Cancel Tasks option item attempts to cancel them again and re-run the Cancel automatic action. It is equivalent to using the Redo transition as described above.
If a group of tasks are canceled together (or if a project is canceled), some tasks failing to cancel and going into Auto Error does not prevent other sibling tasks in the group from being canceled successfully. However, if a child task does fail to cancel, then it does prevent the parent tasks from being canceled successfully. A single failed task cancellation does prevent its project from being canceled successfully, for project cancellations.