In my last blog post, I covered one of the most essential Logic Apps best practices: using a consistent naming convention. Today, I want to continue with the same theme. Naming conventions are critical from day one, yet many teams overlook them.
📝 One-Minute Brief
Learn how to structure and name Logic App actions in a clear, consistent, and future‑proof way. By applying simple naming rules, you improve readability, reduce troubleshooting time, enhance collaboration across teams, and ensure your Logic Apps remain understandable months or even years after they were built.
#2 Actions Naming Convention
Why is it essential to implement a good naming convention in our actions?
Almost for the same reasons we describe in the previous Best Practices, Tips, and Tricks:
Improves readability
Clear action names make Logic Apps easier to understand. When each action has a descriptive name, you can immediately see what it does without opening its configuration. This saves time, reduces frustration, and helps you avoid guessing what an action was supposed to do weeks or months later. Even if you built the workflow yourself, you will forget the details quicker than you expect.
Helps teams share knowledge
Logic Apps often involve multiple teams, developers, departments, or external consultants. Everyone needs to understand the workflow without digging into each action. A consistent naming convention ensures your Logic Apps remain maintainable when team members rotate, leave the project, or hand over the solution to another team. Good names act as built‑in documentation, making the entire workflow easier to follow and modify.
Basic rules about Action names
- Logic App allows you to set a flow name between a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 80 characters!
- Contrary to what happens in Power Automates were you can now use all types of characters. In Logic App, the name of the actions (or triggers) cannot contain any control characters or any of the following symbols:
- ‘
- <
- >
- %
- &
- \
- ?
- /
Basic rules about Trigger names
- Unfortunately, not all triggers allow you to modify the name; this is a big limitation in my opinion, and this behavior should be modified in the future, but for now, we need to deal with it.
Once again, I bet if you work in a software house and create a C# project like this:
using System;
namespace mynamespace
{
public class Class
{
void function1(ref string parm1)
{
/*
* Implement the logic
*
*/
}
}
}
You will be fired immediately, so why do the same on Logic Apps?
In the picture below, I present to you a sample that, unfortunately, we sometimes see in several Azure environments:
If we need to conduct a critical analysis or a good-practice assessment of these types of business workflows. We will probably get to the conclusion that:
- All the shapes have the default name, and based on this picture, no one can understand what the LA is doing without going inside each shape to investigate.
- Unfortunately, as I told you previously, most of the triggers (first shape) don’t allow you to modify the name. When an HTTP request is received, it is one of them.
- The branch If true and If false is also one of those cases that don´t allow you to rename the branch “title”, once again, in my opinion, and this behavior should be modified in the future.
By using descriptive names, as in the picture below, it becomes much easier to identify the action being performed. Of course, in some cases, you need to go inside to get more details.
Once again, you can always go into your existing Logic Apps, fix all the bad best practices implementations, and change the names of your actions, even the ones with dependencies, directly, without any impact. You just need to be aware of one important trick:
- Never rename an action before fixing all broken connectors in your Logic App. For example, if another action still references the old name through a broken connector, renaming the original action will create issues. The designer won’t stop you. It will let you rename Parse JSON to Parse JSON A without showing any warning. Later, when you repair the connection in Add row to a dataset, that action will still reference the old name Parse JSON, not the new one.
- If you first fix the broken connection and then rename the action, everything will work fine.
Stay tuned for the next Logic Apps Best Practices, Tips, and Tricks.
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