If your organization uses Logic Apps Consumption for some enterprise integration scenarios, developing them in Visual Studio 2019 is mandatory. There is no other way to apply proper CI/CD and source control to Logic Apps Consumption.
Although we have a browser embedded in Visual Studio to be able to access the Logic App Designer, the Logic App Designer in Visual Studio 2019 behaves differently from the one in the Azure Portal. One of these different behaviors is the one we will reference here today.
📝 One-Minute Brief
When developing Logic Apps Consumption in Visual Studio 2019, JSON validation behaves differently than in the Azure Portal. This Friday Fact highlights an important flaw where Visual Studio allows invalid JSON payloads inside Compose actions to be saved and deployed without errors. Although the deployment succeeds, the Logic App fails during execution. The article explains why this happens, why it can be dangerous in CI/CD scenarios, and why developers should be extra cautious when validating JSON locally in Visual Studio.
If we are constructing a JSON payload within a Compose action, note that the Compose action in Visual Studio sometimes doesn’t validate the JSON payload!
Notice that the picture above is missing a comma between param1 and param2.
Worse, even if it validates and presents the error message in the editor, it will allow you to save and deploy the Logic app successfully with this error, but it will fail when we try to execute it.
This is the opposite of what happens inside Logic App Designer in the Azure Portal. Although it sometimes takes a little time to validate and present the valid JSON error message, you will not be able to save it if that payload is invalid.
This behavior is clearly a bug within the Visual Studio Logic App extension that I hope Microsoft will fix in the future, since it may cause several problems in our processes, becoming a tedious and time-consuming task for analyzing the issues and their corrections.
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