Looping options in Azure Logic Apps
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Looping options in Azure Logic Apps
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#ServerlessTips - Azure Logic Apps
Author: Steef-Jan Wiggers Azure MVP
With Logic Apps you have several options regarding looping in your workflow definition. Logic Apps supports do-while and for-each looping. For instance, you can interact with arrays by going through each element using a for-each loop, or you can instantiate a separate flow (Logic App) for each element using the Split-On command. With the for-each loop, you can choose between running it sequential or in parallel.
Assume you have a news RSS-feed you like to consume every day and each feed contains one or more news items. You loop through the news items with the for-each control action in a Logic App. When configuring the for each, you can set the concurrency control to 1 up to 50 degrees of parallelism. With one degree of parallelism, you run the for-each sequentially (see also Logic App tip -Improve Performance Using Parallelism).
In case you need the iteration to stop after a failure, you need to use the do-until control action. With the parallelism behaviour, each iteration will execute as a separate thread – thus you can’t terminate a logic app instance within a for each statement.
When you do need to iterate through all the elements within an array whether you execute them in parallel (by default) or sequential a for-each is a good fit. Or when you need more isolation and do not need to aggregate results, or require faster execution you could use a child Logic App with the Split-On command. Below you’ll find a table describing the difference between a for each action and calling a child Logic App with Split-On.
| For-each action | Call child Logic App with Split-On |
|---|---|
| Run multiple iterations in parallel (50 max) | No upper limit on how many child Logic Apps can run in parallel after the split |
| Wait for all iterations to complete | Parent Logic App fire-and-forget |
| Aggregate results from all iterations to determine the for-each status | No aggregation in parent Logic App |
Lastly, there is a blog post by Toon VanHoutte about Working with collections in Logic Apps that provide you with extra details about handling arrays.
Depending on your requirements you have a few options when it comes down to looping inside Logic Apps.
With looping you will execute more actions and increase your consumption costs for Logic Apps. Alternatively, you can use Azure Functions to reduce costs to do looping for you when you need to process each item.
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