Will This Work? - Error Handling w/ "Configure Run After" after Parallel Branches

[dsmcwhir]

Hello,

I have a question about error handling. I have a flow that has about 7 parallel approval branches (middle two branches and the final step of the flow shown in the screenshot) and in the event that one of the approvals does not work for some reason, I would like to be able to notify the person who submitted the request and then have the flow only continue to the final steps of the flow if all of the requests succeeded.

Normally, I understand that a good way to do this would be to add a parallel branch after the approvals request that only runs if the Approval fails. However, in this case, I cannot add a parallel branch to the final step in the flow because it comes immediately after the 7 parallel branches. 

So my solution to this was to add an error notification email in each parallel branch with "Configure Run After" the approval fails or times out. And then to the last step I changed it to "Configure Run After" they are all skipped (2nd picture is this portion zoomed in). So my question is:

Will this work? I have done some tests with a smaller flow and it seems to, I'm just wondering if there's something I'm not thinking of. Part of my confusion is that I'm not sure if it's an OR statement for each error notification (i.e. "If any of them are skipped" it will run) or if it's an AND statement (i.e. "if all of them are skipped").

Hopefully this makes sense. Thanks!

[abm · Accepted solution]

Hi @dsmcwhir 

From what you described and the screen shot it look ok to me. I would say more test on this and make sure everything is ok. The error handling configuration is fine as well.

Thanks

[dsmcwhir]

Thank you! I will try it out over the next couple of weeks and mark this as a solution if it worked.

[KevinApp]

I was looking for the answer to dsmcwhir's question ("OR statement for each error notification (i.e. "If any of them are skipped" it will run) or if it's an AND statement (i.e. "if all of them are skipped)") as well regarding the run-after config with parallel branches. I am assuming if the solution ran as expected that is an "OR". Can someone verify?

[dsmcwhir]

Hi @KevinApp , this did work fine for me and my company has been using this "successfully" for about a year now. Sorry for not marking it as a solution sooner. However, recently I found that my flow was really large, and made error handling pretty difficult. For me at least, Power Automate gets really slow when there are too many actions and it was taking me about 5-8 minutes to even open my flow to edit or view a specific run of my flow. For this reason, I'm in the process of transitioning my workflow into separate workflows to reduce the amount of time error-handling takes. I got that idea here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/guidance/planning/separate-flows

Hope that helps you some!