[BUG] New-PnPTeamsTeam sporadically returns "Conflict (409): Team already exists"

[zapftho]

Reporting an Issue or Missing Feature

We are using PnP Powershell 2.3.0 for provisioning of new Teams within one of our Azure Function Apps. For the New-PnPTeamsTeam cmdlet we have seen the strange behavior that this is sporadically (maybe in 1 out of 20 runs) failing with the error "Conflict (409): Team already exists" even though I can guarantee that this Team does not exist at this point of time. I have also checked what error occurs if I create another Team with the same mail nickname which will give me a more specific error than the one that we are seeing (using the same mailnickname twice will cause "New-PnPTeamsTeam: Bad Request (400): Another object with the same value for property mailNickname already exists.")

After checking the failed creation I can see that the Team got created nevertheless so the error also is misleading. It looks to me that during the creation of the Team there might be some retries or else happening within the Framework which are causing this error.

Is anyone else seeing the same behavior?

Steps to reproduce behavior

This is the line of code that fails with Conflict 409 sporadically

New-PnPTeamsTeam -DisplayName $TeamDisplayName -Description $TeamDescription -MailNickName $MailNickName -Visibility $Visibility -Owners $TeamOwners -Members $TeamMembers -AllowAddRemoveApps $false -AllowChannelMentions $true -AllowCreateUpdateChannels $false -AllowCreateUpdateRemoveConnectors $false -AllowCreateUpdateRemoveTabs $false -AllowCustomMemes $true -AllowDeleteChannels $false -AllowGiphy $true -AllowGuestCreateUpdateChannels $false -AllowGuestDeleteChannels $false -AllowOwnerDeleteMessages $false -AllowStickersAndMemes $true -AllowTeamMentions $true -AllowUserDeleteMessages $false -AllowUserEditMessages $false -GiphyContentRating "Moderate" -ShowInTeamsSearchAndSuggestions $true

What is the version of the Cmdlet module you are running?

2.3.0

Which operating system/environment are you running PnP PowerShell on?

• Windows
• Linux
• MacOS
• Azure Cloud Shell
• Azure Functions
• Other : please specify

[jackpoz]

This happens due to how https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/team-put-teams?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http works.

PnP PowerShell first creates a M365 group and then teamifies it using that graph api, but as the documentation says "If the group was created less than 15 minutes ago, the call might fail with a 404 error code due to replication delays", which is why PnP retries that up to 10 times with an internal of 5 seconds (code at

powershell/src/Commands/Utilities/TeamsUtility.cs

Lines 200 to 227 in 5426135

	var iteration = 0;
	while (retry)
	{
	try
	{
	var teamSettings = await GraphHelper.PutAsync(connection, $"v1.0/groups/{group.Id}/team", team, accessToken);
	if (teamSettings != null)
	{
	returnTeam = await GetTeamAsync(accessToken, connection, group.Id);
	}
	retry = false;
	}
	catch (Exception)
	{
	await Task.Delay(5000);
	iteration++;
	if (iteration > 10)
	{
	throw;
	}
	}
	if (iteration > 10) // don't try more than 10 times
	{
	retry = false;
	}
	}

)

Sometimes the graph api returns an exception or might time out, then in the 5 seconds before the next retry it actually completes teamifying the M365 group, so the next attempt will show the error "Conflict (409): Team already exists" as Teams was enabled already few moments before.

Not saying that the command shouldn't take this into account but more like "you can ignore this particular type of error and this is the reason" 😃

[zapftho]

@jackpoz Thanks for this explanation. I think I understand what is happening here. It might be worth improving the handling of this on the PnP Command. I also noticed that in case of this error not all users that are specified for the "Owners" parameter (only the first one) and none of the users specified for the "Members" parameter are added to the M365 group. The group is there, the Team is there but it seems that PnP cannot complete some of its actions because Graph API has that delay in telling us that the Group / Team has been successfully created.

For my case I will be looking for a way on how to handle this specific error in my provisioning script. If I am able to catch this specific error code I could try it with a Get-PnPTeamsTeam command in the catch block to get the Team (and add the specified owners and members to the group) so that my provisioning script can proceed without failing completely. Its just hard to get the correct condition to catch this in a catch block as it is happening only sporadically and I wasn't able to reproduce this so far by myself.

[gautamdsheth]

@jackpoz - can we improve this in our code ? If so, how do we do that ?

[jackpoz]

We can probably handle "Conflict (409): Team already exists" as a special case that a previous request successfully create the team.
If we want to be 100% sure, we could do a GET on Graph for the newly created group and verify that it's Teams enabled.

I will see if I can check this in the next days.

[gautamdsheth]

@jackpoz - assigning it to you 😊

[jackpoz]

@gautamdsheth well I found the time 😄

[gautamdsheth]

@zapftho - we have merged the code by @jackpoz to better handle this error. Fix will be available in tomorrow's nightly build as well the next major release version.

Thanks all :)

[zapftho]

Thanks @jackpoz & @gautamdsheth for the quick solution! I will have to wait for the next major release to get the signed version of the module but I am fine with it as its only happening sporadically and I might try to just do a similar workaround in my Powershell script for provisioning until its available.

This is what I will be trying. Not sure if it can correctly catch the error like this as I wasn't able to reproduce it myself so far and only can see it in my Application Insights logs. So really hard to determine what condition is needed to catch this:

try{
    $team = New-PnPTeamsTeam -DisplayName $TeamDisplayName -Description $TeamDescription -MailNickName $MailNickName -Visibility $Visibility -Owners $TeamOwners -Members $TeamMembers -AllowAddRemoveApps $false -AllowChannelMentions $true -AllowCreateUpdateChannels $false -AllowCreateUpdateRemoveConnectors $false -AllowCreateUpdateRemoveTabs $false -AllowCustomMemes $true -AllowDeleteChannels $false -AllowGiphy $true -AllowGuestCreateUpdateChannels $false -AllowGuestDeleteChannels $false -AllowOwnerDeleteMessages $false -AllowStickersAndMemes $true -AllowTeamMentions $true -AllowUserDeleteMessages $false -AllowUserEditMessages $false -GiphyContentRating "Moderate" -ShowInTeamsSearchAndSuggestions $true -Connection $pnpAdminConnection
}
catch{
    if($_.Exception.Message -match "Conflict (409): Team already exists") {
        Write-Warning "Team already exists / M365 Group already teamified. Trying to get already existing Team based on MailNickName."
        $team = Get-PnPTeamsTeam -$MailNickName -Connection $pnpAdminConnection
    }
    else{
        throw
    }
}

[jackpoz]

That will not be enough, your will have to replicate also this chunk to add members and owners as "members" through $"v1.0/teams/{group.Id}/members/add" :
https://github.com/jackpoz/powershell/blob/e26ef0aa8c37e3789f2b28c6534a27738e99c07d/src/Commands/Utilities/TeamsUtility.cs#L234-L259

Basically handling what you noticed:

I also noticed that in case of this error not all users that are specified for the "Owners" parameter (only the first one) and none of the users specified for the "Members" parameter are added to the M365 group

[zapftho]

@jackpoz Good point, nearly forgot about this part, thanks for reminding me again :-)