Last week’s community drop-in session tackled a common question: what should your workflow do when a source system goes down?
Our guest, Mohammad Khader (General Manager at Al-Khader for Engineering Industries), joined @PiusK to dig into how OpenFn handles redundancy. If System A is unreachable, how does a workflow know to fall back to System B?
We explored this live and scaffolded a working example using the AI Assistant. Here’s the pattern we built:
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A cron trigger kicks off the workflow at midnight -
An httpstep attempts to fetch HRIS data from System X -
A conditional path checks the result: if System X is live, data flows straight to downstream jobs; if the instance is down, the workflow retries the fetch using System Y -
If the fallback also fails, the error is logged to a Google Sheet via the googlesheetsadaptor -
A final gmailstep sends an email alert about the new error entry
The nice thing about this pattern is that failure handling lives on the Canvas itself. Conditional paths make the fallback logic visible and easy to reason about, rather than buried in job code, and the whole thing was scaffolded in minutes with the AI Assistant.
Join us tomorrow (and every Wednesday) 
@PiusK hosts drop-in sessions every Wednesday at 10am UTC. Bring a workflow you’re stuck on, a system you want to connect, or a question like this one, and we’ll work through it together.
Add it to your calendar: https://addcal.io/c/a983ivzc4gqk