Is there a way to tell Zapier to just ignore an error in a particular step?

Hey there, @Jimbotron3000! 

Hope you don’t mind but I’ve moved your question out into it’s own topic to help give it a bit more visibility since the topic it was asked on is two years old!

Is there a way to tell Zapier to just ignore an error in a particular step?

If it’s a search step, there’s usually the option to allow the Zap to continue to next steps if nothing is found instead of erroring. See: Add your search criteria > Optional: Let the Zap continue even if nothing is found. But you can’t set non-search actions to ignore errors. That would be a great feature to have so I’ve passed your ideas about having a checkbox to ignore errors on specific steps (as well as the if/then option) over to our Product team! 😁
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For situations like “If the field isn’t empty, update the HubSpot contact record” you could the Exists rule on either a filter, or paths in a Zap. That would allow you to check whether a value exists for a specific field, like the phone number. Then the Zap would only continue to run subsequent actions if a phone number was available to use when updating the contact.

It’s also possible to set a default value to be used if a specific field is blank using Formatter by Zapier action. You can find out more about how to do that here: Set default values for blank fields in Zaps

Hope that helps! 🤞

Thank you, @SamB 

My biggest use case is with HubSpot. For example, let’s say I search for a deal with “Find Deal”, but the deal doesn’t exist. I can check the box to let the Zap continue if nothing is found, but then if I try to use that deal in a later step, for example “Get Deal Owner” or “Get Deal Stage”, those steps error out and there’s no way to avoid that.

Regarding using filters or paths, it doesn’t solve the problem. Filters doesn’t work because I don’t want to stop the Zap altogether when the deal isn’t found, because the deal isn’t necessary information for the rest of the Zap (it’s just nice to have, but can be omitted).  Paths don’t work, because the rest of the Zap still has a lot of steps that I want to execute regardless, and paths permanently split execution into completely separate paths. With “paths” I’d need to duplicate my entire logic in both paths, with the exception of the steps I want to skip. Since this happens multiple times in the same Zap, I’d end up with 8 parallel paths.

What Zapier really needs is a simple “If/Then” and “Goto/Label” functionality. I should be able to say “If deal doesn't exist, goto step 7”. This would solve all our problems and is a very basic feature of just about any programming language.

Happy to help @Jimbotron3000! 🙂

Ah, yes I can see how that’s not ideal. Having an IF/Then feature that would allow you to set which part of a Zap should be run based on certain outcomes would be awesome! I can totally see myself using that too. I’ve passed your additional comments here over to the Product team for consideration too.

In the meantime, we do now have the ability to duplicate existing action steps and paths, which might make the process of replicating the existing paths a bit quicker: Duplicate action steps and paths

It’s not possible to have 8 parallel paths but depending on your workflow, it might be possible to nest some paths within each path to achieve the desired outcome. More on nested paths here:

• The magic of nested Paths

Hopefully that’ll help while the desired IF/Then functionality isn’t available.

Hello @SamB , 
I hope all is well. 

Has there been any advancements from the product team in regards to this matter? 
Thank you very much, 

Kind regards

Thanks for checking on this, @ArnaudCha! 👋
 
We’ve recently released a new error handler beta feature (available on Professional plans or higher) to define how Zaps should proceed if they run into an error. An error handler can be added to any step in a Zap, except for trigger and Paths steps - but can be added to an action step within a path. It allows the Zap to run different actions depending on whether the step was run successfully or ran into an error.

You can learn more about this here: Set up custom error handling

Hope that helps. Do let us know if you run into any issues in giving the error handler feature a try!

@SamB unfortunately the handler is useless. It does nothing but give the ability to add a dead end :/. A path would still be best case scenario and not a good one as previously mentioned. A good solution ive found is to use the "make" platform for automations that require a solution. It's actually alot cheaper to use As well. I still use zapier cause "make" is more advanced and has a learning curve. But the more I use it the better I get at it.  

@Isaacc2207 

Info about the using the Error Handler in Zaps which allows for 2 Paths, and each path can have action steps.

• Success
• Error

EXAMPLE

Hi @Isaacc2207! 👋

@SamB unfortunately the handler is useless. It does nothing but give the ability to add a dead end :/. A path would still be best case scenario and not a good one as previously mentioned. A good solution ive found is to use the "make" platform for automations that require a solution. It's actually alot cheaper to use As well. I still use zapier cause "make" is more advanced and has a learning curve. But the more I use it the better I get at it.  

As Troy mentioned above, it would be possible to use the Error Handler to set up two paths to carry out different actions based on whether a step in the Zap has errored or not.

Can you clarify what you mean by “It does nothing but give the ability to add a dead end”? I’d love to get some further context on that so I can share further details with the Product Team to get things improved.

Looking forward to hearing from you on that! 🙂

I understand what he is saying because we are having this same problem. The issue is that I don’t want to do anything if there is an error. My use case is this - When someone submits our form, we have zapier create a customer in shopify. Sometimes, that person already exists in shopify and we get an error. In this scenario, I don’t need or want zapier to do anything. There is no other action that I need Zapier to perform. I’d love to use there new error handler to prevent zapier from alerting me about errors but right now it requires that I add an action to the error step and I don’t want to add an action so I end up with a dead end and I can’t publish the zap.

@top 

If you are using the Error Handler, then within the Error path, add a Filter step with a condition that will never evaluate to true, thus the Filter step will never pass.

Then add a valid Zap action step, which will never be performed if the Filter step never passes.

@top 

To prevent the error in the first place use this Zap action: Shopify - Find Customer

Within that Zap action, there is the option to create a new Shopify Customer if not found.

The result of the Zap step should always be a success if configured correctly.