Long running flow for 9 months

[Cycy]

Hello all,

I am very new at using power automate.

I built a flow that needs to run for about 9-12 months before getting to the end of the flow. I understand there is a 30 day run time limit per flow. Is there any way to have it run for that long ?

I have multiple approval steps in the flow and it is trigger by a MS form. I also have some delays of 3 months between some approvals.
thanks in advance for your answers.

[Pstork1]

One workaround to do a flow that runs for that long is to make it a recurrence flow.  Record the current status in a list, have the flow wake up periodically (daily, weekly, monthly) and do whatever necessary to move it to the next stage. Then let it stop. When wakes again it can work to get to the next stage. In this case the individual approval steps need to be less than 30 days, but the full process can run as long as needed.

There is no way to change the flow to actually run more than 30 days directly.

[David_MA]

You could also break the process out into multiple workflows. For example, if you have five approvals, create one workflow for each approval. This way, you effectively extend the process out to about five months since each approval can take 28 days.

You could trigger the next approval in one of two ways:

• Set up a field in your list that the prior approval populates with the outcome of the approval when it is completed. Then configure trigger conditions appropriate to start the next approval.
• The above can get tricky and require adding unnecessary fields to your list so the flow only triggers one time. So, I prefer to call the next flow with an HTTP request.

In the second option, the calling workflow sends the ID of the item to the receiving workflow so you can use the Get item action to get the field data. The action below is for the receiving flow.

And this is the action for the calling flow:

The process illustrated above is broken into 12 workflows. There are two workflows within the 12 that use a trigger condition. To handle this, I have a choice column with the name of the 12 workflows in it. The flow triggers when a field is populated, and the workflow status is set to the prior workflow name. When the flow triggers, it updates the workflow status field to its name so it cannot trigger again. With the exception of the 28 days for each approval, this allows this process to take essentially forever.

[Cycy]

Thank you very much for your answer. Very insightful ! I am just a bit confused about this part: “The flow triggers when a field is populated, and the workflow status is set to the prior workflow name. When the flow triggers, it updates the workflow status field to its name so it cannot trigger again.” Is that something I have to do manually on my sharepoint to trigger the new flows? (again very new at this) thank you 

[David_MA]

You need to manually add the trigger conditions to your flow. Using my purchase request solution as an example, I have a flow that is triggered when someone chooses an invalid invoice approver. The flow that runs when an item is submitted uses a get user profile action to get details of the approver.

Sometimes people will select a service or admin account and it causes the Get user profile action to fail. The workflows handles this error and tells the person what they entered is invalid and to update the request with a valid person.

I have another workflow that runs when the item is updated. It has these trigger conditions, so it only runs when an invalid person has been selected:

The trigger condition above is from a flow triggered when an item is modified. The prime flow populates the WindowsID field with Invalid Account. So when the update the item and the request has not already been rejected, it will trigger and then resolve the name of the new person entered.

I hope this makes sense.

[Cycy]

Hello,

i would like to understand how the timeout works in flows. 
so I have a flow that is triggered by an MS form. There are multiple approval steps. There will be no more than 30 days between each steps but it should take about 9-12 months to get to the end of the flow. Will it still timeout after 30 days even if each approval is being action before 30 days ?

thank you 

[Cycy]

Yes that makes sense! Is there a way to get all the dynamic data from the first flow into the second flow ? For instead I have outcomes from previous approvals and UPNs to send the approvals to

[v-bofeng-msft]

Hi @Cycy  , 

This flow will time out. The life cycle of a flow is 30 days, so as long as the total running time of the actions in the flow exceeds 30 days, the flow will time out. As an alternative, you can consider using the parent flow to call the sub-flow. After completing an approval, run the sub-flow and use the sub-flow to initiate a new approval.

Best Regards,

Bof

[David_MA · Accepted solution]

Yes, you would just need to include that data in the payload of the http request for both the sending and receiving flows. However, I keep things simple and the prior flow updates all this information in the list before it calls the next flow. That is why I only need the item ID and then can use the Get item action to retrieve all the data associated with the list item.