Recently I worked on a project using Azure Automation Runbooks and PnP-PowerShell (for SharePoint Online) to automate some changes on a SharePoint site. When I used any commandlet that creates, adds or changes something – like “Add-PnP…”, “New-PnP…”, “Update-PnP…”, “Set-PnP…” – the runbook enters a loop for three times without any error message and then the runbooks failed.

So from the console and logs, you could access, you are not able to see more information about the problem. Also if you want to use catch{$_.Exception.Message} it wouldn’t work, because the runbook is never going to this state and just restarts when executing the commandlet:

As you can see, after executing the commandlet (Add-PnPView) – “Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.View” – the runbook stops for about one to two minutes and then restarts again.

Here you can see my code snippet. The script/runbook crushed everytime on the line “Add-PnPView…”

#Connect to PnP Online
Write-Output ("Connecting to PnPOnline")
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $siteurl -Credentials $cred

#Add new View
Write-Output ("Add new View")
Add-PnPView -List $listname -Title $viewname -Fields "Title"

After a few emails, I got feedback from Microsoft Support with a similar issue: https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-PowerShell/issues/1541

In this article, the user “jwiersem” gives the hint to add a variable before the commandlet

#Connect to PnP Online
Write-Output ("Connecting to PnPOnline")
Connect-PnPOnline -Url $siteurl -Credentials $cred

#Add new View
Write-Output ("Add new View")
$view = Add-PnPView -List $listname -Title $viewname -Fields "Title"

Then the runbook runs successfully without any loop.

hanks again to the Microsoft Support for a great collaboration on this issue and the very fast contacting.

I hope this helps you too if you are struggling with this error