Logic App Resubmission

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While handling enterprise scale workflows / B2B Integrations, failure points should be handled by design. Azure Logic Apps provide great platform to stitch such integrations/processes that span across multiple actions on a trigger message.

Comparing Logic apps to BizTalk orchestrations, there are lot of differences between how workflow execution is handled. Hence design should take care how message failures can be handled gracefully.

In a typical B2B integration scenario using EDI messaging, most of the integration processes involve following steps:

  1. Handshake with B2B partner in a secured manner (usually using AS2 over Http transport protocol)
  2. EDI message validation
  3. Message transformation
  4. Sending message to Line of Business application of an enterprise

 

And then it also involves other complexities like batching/de-batching, process tracking and failure recovery.

In BizTalk message persistence and orchestration state persistence helped resuming the failed instances from the stage it failed. And in some scenario compensation block with scope shape helped handling of workflow failures.

Azure logic app has provided a feature called Resubmit. This can retrigger the new run with same trigger inputs with which the original run instance was invoked.

But to use this to handle failures and enabling resume from the stage it failed, the total workflow should be designed by breaking whole workflow process into logical atomic stages and creating one Logic App each for each logical stage. This should ensure message integrity and consistent state at each logical stage. Hence if failure happens in a particular stage due to the reasons other than data issues where message resume can solve the problem, then Resubmission feature can be safely used at each logical stage to resume the process.