Unexpected Flow Triggers

[imran7799]

Hi,

I have created a Flow on a custom list that has more than 10000 items. The flow is set to run when Item is created or modified in this list.

When I created the flow couple of day ago it was working fine. The flow was disabled since than. However, when I turned the flow back on today and try to test it by modifying single item. I noticed huge number of flow instances started running even for the list items that were not modified. I also checked the modified timestamp of couple of running instances and it was also set to couple of days back.  Here is the screenshot from one of the instance, as you can see the flow ran today but the modified stamp on the item is March 1st.

Has anyone encountered such issue before ?

[v-zhos-msft]

Hi @imran7799 ,

I think there must have some other flows with the same trigger of this flow.

So when you run the other flows, this flow was also triggered in the past.

You can add a specific condition to this flow to prevent the flow been triggered by other flows.

There are some sinilar cases you can take a reference:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/Stop-flow-re-triggering-on-item-created-modified/...

Best Regards,

Community Support Team _ Zhongys

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly

[Willemijn · Accepted solution]

Yes! When you turn off a flow an you turn it back on. It has kept track of all activities that would have triggered the Flow and execute them when you turn it back on. Very anoying and not what you would expect. 

What I did was the following: before turning the Flow back on I added a box cancel Flow or teminate (don't know what the English term is for it cause it was in a dutch environment) -> wait untill all the runs of the past are done and then remove the block. 

[imran7799]

No there is no other flow and the update is on a different list so there is no possibility of re-trigger either. I created a new exact same flow by copying this one and its working fine.

[imran7799]

I did think about that but than the same case didn’t happen for my another flow that I turned on after 7-8 months.

I did apply Terminate flow box right after it start to end all the running instances, but it was still starting too many new instances so I ended up creating a new flow by copying the existing one.

Thanks for your reply. This makes sense now.

[Willemijn]

Could be that there is a time it keeps track of it; I think it is somekind of webhook that is called by an event in your list. So even though the Flow is off, the webhook keeps getting events from your list. 

Maybe it keeps then for lets say 90 days (don't know that, its just a guess) and when you turn it back on after that it's 'clean again' but all of this is just guessing and assumptions 😉 

And yes, when you have a lot of new or edited items it can be nasty. I came across this when migration a SharePoint environment. For test I already created the Flow. Then I switched of the Flow, migrated all the content and then turned on the Flow again ->Bingo! Flow executed all actions 😞