Error Workflow not triggered from certain Workflows

Questions
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1

Hi everyone, looking to see if anyone can help with this issue. Thank you!

Describe the problem/error/question

For some reason, my error workflow is not triggered for some workflows when they finish with an error. It is triggered for some othe workflows though so the error handler workflow seems to be working as expected.
See the example below.

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What is the error message (if any)?

No error message; the data_error_handler workfow is simply not triggered.

Please share your workflow

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Share the output returned by the last node

I don’t thin this is relevant but in the execution above, the last node returned the following error message: The service was not able to process your request

  • n8n version: 2.4.8 on n8n Cloud
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main): default with the exception of the timezone and the error workflow as shown in the screenshot above.
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2

Hi @bruno

Do you by any chance have the ‘Continue On Fail’ option turned on in the HTTP node?

when you tell a node to continue on fail, it suppresses the error completely. the workflow just keeps running. since the execution never actually crashes, n8n flags the whole thing as a success. your error handler just sleeps right through it.

just open that http node’s settings tab and toggle off ‘Continue On Fail’. once you let the node actually break the workflow, your error handler will catch it perfectly from what i’ve seen.

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3

I don’t see a Continue on Fail but I do have the option to Retry on Fail (but it is configured to fail after 5 attempts). See the screenshot below.

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4

Hi @bruno, welcome to the n8n community :tada: !
Make sure the workflow actually ends with a Failed status. If the error is being handled inside the loop (or retried internally), the workflow may still complete successfully. You may need to remove internal error handling or adjust the node configuration so the failure isn’t absorbed and the workflow truly fails when something goes wrong, like an IF node or manually throw an error after a critical failure to force a failed state.

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5

Are you testing this by running the workflow manually? Error workflows only fire on production/automatic executions (webhook, schedule, etc), not manual test runs. If you’re already running it in production and it’s still not triggering, check if the execution status shows as “error” or “success” because the Loop node might be swallowing the error somehow.

1 Like
6

Thank you to all of those that chipped in. Turns out the issue was being caused by a malformed JSON which I was using to create the workflows.

I was passing in the name of the workflow in the errorWorkflow setting, but it turns out it expects the ID of the workflow.

The workflow was still being created and in the UI it was still showing the “correct” name for the error handler workflow, which was what caused some confusion in the end.

Hope this helps others!

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