Process Stops if Phone Number is Invalid. Can I Change This?

[jthurston]

Hello,

We have a Google Form students are using to sign up for summer and fall classes. I created a Process to send students confirmation texts and emails after they complete the form. The process runs once an hour, and has many branching paths, so students get different messages based on their choices. However, no matter the path, the last step marks a [Confirmation Sent] column as TRUE. And the first step checks to see if this column is marked TRUE, so students only get the confirmation once.

One of our teachers has reported that she filled out the form as a test and has gotten the confirmation email dozens of times! I checked the Sheet, and her [Confirmation Sent] column is not marked as TRUE. I found a few other rows with the same issue.

The phone number she entered is 555-555-5555, since she was just testing. Some of the other rows that don’t have the column marked TRUE are from other teachers using dummy phone numbers. So my best guess is that for the affected rows, the phone number is invalid. And when the text step of the process fails, the entire process ends. Is there a way to bypass this so that we aren’t sending a ton of emails to anyone who doesn’t enter a valid phone number? Or maybe there could be another cause?

Thank you,

[APiCC_Conor]

This sounds suspiciously like a similar issue I and others have had where a workflow failed due to a single invalid phone number. Your best bet may be to contact support@appsheet.com

If this is the same issue it’s a bug and is not intended behavior.

[jthurston]

Thank you!

[Dan_Bahir]

Hi Justin,

Thanks for bringing this up. The process execution currently stops when it cannot execute one of the steps. We plan in the future to allow error handling so you would be able to define what to do in case of an error. However that is not currently available. As a workaround If you would like to always update the [Confirmation Sent] regardless of the result of the previous step you can just reorder the steps. First update the column and then send the SMS, that way if the SMS fails to send the column will still be updated.

[jthurston]

Thank you for the information.