Alternative to SharePoint Remote Event Receiver

Question

I have been investigating a problem for some time in which a Remote Event Receiver I had written for an Azure hosted app was sporadically not taking effect (less than 1% of the time). I put in some serious logging but couldn't identify the issue, as far as I could tell the remote receiver wasn't being called by some actions that should have triggered it. I eventually escalated the problem to Microsoft and after some time their response was effectively that they can't guarantee the event receiver will trigger with 100% reliability.

So what I'm looking for is any suggestions on ways to improve reliability of a RER or alternatives that can be used to trigger an event each time an item is added or updated to a list in SharePoint.

Answer 1

Whoever first guided you toward using Remote Event Receivers should have indicated that they're not guaranteed to fire, so they're only suited for non-critical notifications and user interface improvements (like refreshing a view when an item is added to a list).

To truly guarantee the execution of some action when items are added or updated in a list, your two best options are workflows and server-side event receivers.

Since it sounds like your environment is cloud-hosted, you are likely restricted to using workflows (event receivers require deployment of custom farm solutions).

For reference on how to create a workflow, see Microsoft's documentation entitled "Creating a workflow by using SharePoint Designer 2013 and the SharePoint 2013 Workflow platform".