topic Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks in Workato Pros Discussion Board

Creating Collections within retry blocks

jason1 — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 03:10:45 GMT

We have error handling retry logic that re-runs our recipe up to some max_attempts whenever we hit API rate limits. Since our recipe creates a Collection as part of its logic, we started seeing failures due to "table name already exists" -- which I suspect is because you can only create a single Collection for a list once in a given recipe.

Are there any good workarounds for this?

Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks

gordon-hu — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 03:12:36 GMT

Hi I have the same issue. It seems that during the retry, Workato was not smart enough to “clear” the Collection. In the end, we just decided not to retry ….

Is it a bug? Feature request? 😊

Gordon

Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks

ajorde — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 03:14:07 GMT

A couple options I've done on this - name your collection with the name you want, but append the retry count to the name. It looks silly but it still runs correctly. Option 2 - create your collection outside the error monitor and right after the monitor starts, delete the records from the collection so that you know you're starting fresh with an empty collection.

Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks

jason1 — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 03:24:47 GMT

Amazing. Amy Jorde and Simon Zelazo using the attempt number variable seemed to do the trick. Thank you!

Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks

ajorde — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 03:32:18 GMT

Small caveat - just make sure when you're querying results back that you're querying the right version of the collection with the retry count name.

Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks

ben-urbanski — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 03:55:24 GMT

Hello Jason,

You could first check to see if the table already exists and drop it if necessary. Here’s a screenshot of a recipe that wants to recreate a table in each iteration of a loop (a similar problem):

Regards,

Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks

ryan-stewart — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 08:14:13 GMT

Also, If you are creating a bunch of collections with retry numbers, be sure all those collections get cleaned up at some point in the recipe.

Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks

viswanathan-r — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 08:33:58 GMT

I faced the same exact issue. So I used a Ruby code which generates random 10 digit number. I appended the 10 digit to my table name. Now so far no issues.

Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks

gabriel-sim — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 21:30:29 GMT

Wow, so many clever workarounds! I'll look into it from the product side as well to see if we can provide a better way to solve it.

Re: Creating Collections within retry blocks

gabriel-sim — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 13:03:10 GMT

Hi everyone, we added an option that allows you to override the list which should address this issue. It's available as an optional field in this step.