Handling Exceptions

Question

Im playing with the Write to Data Store Entity Smart Server and have had no problems in getting it to work. 
 However I'd like to ask how exceptions are handled ? Lets say for instance that when I attempt to write to the DB, that the DB is offline. 
 How are retries handled ? I have found the following page : 
 https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/17.1/Automatic_Error-Handling.html 
 Which seems to suggest it's all handled internally, but if that is the case It doesn't really tell me what happens to the process once max retries is hit ? During the retry period is there any notification sent to an admin, or is it simple held in the 'Alerts'. 
 If retires are only logged at DEBUG level - it's not going to be possible to write an external process that starts a notification mail - as by default we're not logging at DEBUG.

Josh · Accepted Answer

Unfortunately, there isn&#x27;t a great solution to this problem. What you can do is schedule a timer to start with your write to Data Store Entity node and after one minute check to see if the node completed successfully. If the node completed then you do nothing, but if it did not succeed, you would restart the timer and the write to data store node.

rodgraham · Answer

The failing node will get a red line through it and the process should be visible in processes with problems report. The documentation does state that the final retry is logged as an error. Alert would be generated for the failed node. You could add an exception to the failing node to redirect the process down an alternative path if wanted.

Dave Lewis · Answer

One other thing you might want to consider is the saved values output. This works slightly better than the true / false by giving you the data from the database so that you can also compare against an expected value in the asynch process waiting to see if database write happened. 
 
This would allow you to log database writes that technically happened, but not as they should, where the node completes but the data is somehow wrong.