Go back to a previous step in Flow

[WillyD44]

Oftentimes in workflows you need to go back to an earlier step.  As it stands in FLOW today, you have to rewrite this step/action, which lends itself to creating huge monolithic workflows that are hard to write, understand and maintain. 

SharePoint Designer 2013 allowed to go back/call an earlier step.  This was very powerful.  I really hope to see this in FLOW soon.  

Bill

[sjehanzeb]

this has not happened in 3 years -- very low on priority. 

[hafthorth]

Well three years later but decided to leave a comment in case someone's google search leads them here.
Was thinking the same thing, but as I thought more on this, I realized that it must be way to do this using to Do Until action and I think that should be able to solve most if not all use cases for this. Setting some variable and set up a do until loop to do until that variable equals specific value.

Although an action to go to a custom step would be supercool and simple, this still is enough for me to simplify a flow that I had created a lot!

[AntoinetteB]

My Google search did lead me here, but I cannot find any examples of how to use the Do Until action to route to a previous step.  Do until seems to only refer to the action directly before the Do Until Action.  I cannot see a way to route the Do Until to other steps.

[hafthorth]

Hey @AntoinetteB 

In order to use Do Until for this you would need to:

- Create a variable, for example boolean and set to false

- Create a Do until loop that runs until that variable equals true.

- Place the step you want to go back to inside the do until at the beginning.

- Add all the actions you want to do before you return back to the first step.

- Then this will repeat forever

- To break the loop, you would want to add some conditional action that either changes the variable to true (based on some result) or do nothing.

- If it changes to true, you will exit the loop

- If not the loop continues going back to the beginning.

If you tell me what you want to do I could give you a better description/example

Regards,

Hafthor

[AntoinetteB]

Hi, thank you.  It didn't work for me so I just aborted mission and instead copied in all the steps I needed over again.  Labor intensive, but it works perfectly.  Thanks for the info.