Execute Actions Asynchronously

Audience: Low-code Engineers

Skill Prerequisites: Actions, Tokens

Starts a list of actions in the background, on a separate server thread, and continues immediately without waiting for them to finish. The user gets a response straight away while slow work, such as sending emails or calling external services, carries on in the background.

The background actions get a copy of all tokens as they are when this action runs.

Typical Use Cases

• Send notification emails after a form is submitted without making the user wait
• Call slow external APIs or webhooks whose result the user doesn't need to see
• Start long-running processing, such as generating documents or syncing records, and return to the user straight away

Don't use it to

• Run actions whose results you need later. Tokens created in the background aren't available to the actions that follow, and the background actions may not have finished yet.
• Show messages, redirect or return data to the user. The background actions can't send anything back to the browser.
• Run very long or heavy jobs on busy sites. Background threads use the web server's resources. For scheduled or long-running work, use Automation jobs instead.

Related Actions

Action Name	Description
Execute Actions	Runs a list of actions and waits for them, with error handling.
Log Error	Records problems from the background actions, because they can't be shown to the user.

Input Parameter Reference

Parameter	Description	Supports Tokens	Default	Required
Actions	The list of actions to run in the background, in order.	No	empty	Yes

Considerations

• Tokens are copied, not shared. The background actions see the tokens that existed when this action ran. Changes they make aren't visible to the other actions, and changes made later by the other actions aren't visible to them.
• No results come back. Messages, redirects and other results from the background actions are ignored.
• Errors are only logged. If a background action fails, the error is written to the application log and the remaining background actions don't run. The user isn't told. To handle errors, put the actions inside an Execute Actions action with On Error actions, such as Log Error or an email to an administrator.
• Order isn't guaranteed. The actions after this one may run before, during or after the background actions. Don't rely on a record the background actions create or change.
• Server restarts. Background work is lost if the application restarts while it's running, for example during a deployment or an application pool recycle.

Examples

tip

To understand how to use the below examples, please see Running Examples.

1. Notify the team in the background, with error logging

This action runs a notification step in the background so the user doesn't wait for it. The inner Execute Actions logs any error, because background errors can't be shown to the user.

{
    "Title": "Execute Actions Asynchronously",
    "ActionType": "ExecuteActionsAsync",
    "Description": "Notify the team without making the user wait",
    "Condition": null,
    "Parameters": {
        "ActionList": [
            {
                "Title": "Execute Actions",
                "ActionType": "ExecuteActions",
                "Parameters": {
                    "ActionList": [
                        {
                            "Title": "Run SQL Query",
                            "ActionType": "RunSql",
                            "Parameters": {
                                "ConnectionString": "",
                                "QueryTimeout": "",
                                "SqlQuery": "EXEC dbo.ProcessPendingNotifications",
                                "BindTokens": "",
                                "OutputTokenName": "",
                                "ExtractColumns": "",
                                "OnError": [],
                                "ShowErrors": false
                            }
                        }
                    ],
                    "OnError": [
                        {
                            "Title": "Log Error",
                            "ActionType": "LogError",
                            "Parameters": {
                                "Message": "Background notification failed: [ExceptionMessage]"
                            }
                        }
                    ]
                }
            }
        ]
    }
}

Revised 09/25/2026