Skip to content

Okta Workflows — Error Handling & Retry Mechanism (§7)

Four quirks. The key surprise: automatic card-level retry only ever fires on 429.

Quirk 7.1 — Card-level retry ONLY fires on HTTP 429 (and 504 in Connector Builder)

"Retries for cards in flows only take place as a result of HTTP 429 Too Many Requests errors. You can't set error handling for other HTTP errors." Default Retry is 0 times; default After is 5 minutes; Then options are Halt Flow / Return Values / Run another Flow. In Connector Builder, the default is "retry on 429 and 504… three times between one and three seconds." For non-429 retries you must use an If Error block.

  • Sources: set-error-handling.htm; best-practices-rate-limits.htm

Quirk 7.2 — Custom retry status codes via List Construct

To retry on other codes, add a List Construct card listing the codes, rename its output (e.g., retry_codes), select "Specified errors" in the Raw Request card's Error Handling dialog, and drag retry_codes into the Status Codes field.

  • Source: best-practices-rate-limits.htm

Quirk 7.3 — Max 3 nested If Error blocks

"To avoid parsing errors caused by complex error handling, Okta recommends a limit of no more than three nested If Error blocks."

  • Source: architecture-best-practices.htm

Quirk 7.4 — Error propagation from helper flows

If Error/Try blocks act as anonymous helper flows; a Return inside them proceeds after the block rather than halting. To propagate a hard failure to the parent, use Return Error / Return Error If outside the block.

  • Source: errorhandling_trycatch.htm

Plugin: okta-workflows · View SKILL.md on GitHub