Error message when shortcut runs in widget

I have a shortcut that I use to take a picture of a receipt, give it a title, convert to PDF, and save it in a folder on my iCloud. It is a modified version of a shortcut that David Sparks created years ago. It runs great in the Shortcuts app, but I’d like to run it from the iOS 14 widget. When I tap on it in the widget, everything seems to work great until I get to the last step of the shortcut – where it saves to a folder in iCloud. At that point, I get an error message saying “There was a problem running the shortcut”. Switching the save location from iCloud to Dropbox doesn’t fix the problem.

Has anyone else figured out a solution when a simple shortcut runs fine in the Shortcuts app but not in a widget? Thanks.

-Jeff

Is adding the “Continue in Shortcuts App” step to your Shortcut an option for you?

That’s a good idea, and adding a Continue in the Shortcuts App does make it work. But it is certainly less elegant than just running the shortcut from within the widget. Nevertheless, thanks for the tip.

-Jeff

It may well, as usual, be a limitation on the available memory to complete the operation. To check if that is the case, you could create a test widget that saves some text or even a very small PDF to file. If that saves successfully, it points towards, but is not an absolute guarantee, of it being a resource limitation. If it still fails, then that’s a sign of something else at work.