Old data used when flow re-enabled

[cdn4lf]

Hi All,

Hoping someone has encountered this before.  I had a flow that was disabled for a period of time (2 months), as some changes were being made and an alternate flow was used on this SP list in the interim.

When I finished making all the changes and re-enabled the original flow, it captured the 2 months worth of data and ran it through the automation...erroneously.  The trigger is a when a new item is added, in case that matters.

So my question is: Why did the flow grab data that wasn't recently added.  If the flow is off, shouldn't that mean it isn't recording any data, and that the flow can be turned on at a later date without pulling in old data?

Sean

[v-litu-msft]

Hi @cdn4lf,

To prevent it, you could set a trigger condition to make the Flow trigger only work when the created time greater than 1 day ago:

@greater(triggerBody()?['Created'],addDays(utcNow(),-1,'yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ssZ'))

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[cdn4lf]

@v-litu-msft , I realize that, and will need to do that going forward.

My question is around the function of turning a flow "OFF".  If my flow is/was "OFF", why did it appear to retain history of what data it had previously dealt with.  In this case, it was more of a "PAUSE", which feels like a bug.

If I had know the flow was "PAUSED", I would have ensured there were controls in place to prevent this data from being actioned.  

So going back to the original question:, why was the data grabbed and what is the true function/purpose of turning a flow off.

• Scheduled flow - I assume it won't run until it's turned "ON" and when it does run, it will capture all data that meets the given criteria...this makes sense
• Button flow - Same as scheduled flow and prevents accidental triggering....again, this makes sense.
• Automation based flow - This is where the "OFF" feature needs clarification.  The flow didn't run when "OFF", which is the expected behaviour.  What is the flow supposed to do when turned back "ON" and where is this documented?

Sean

[v-litu-msft]

Hi @cdn4lf,

Here is the response by Stephen who is a Power Automate developer:

As is covered in the comments this is not a bug but an important feature to avoid data loss -- this allows you to temporarily disable a flow, make corrections, and then enable the flow, running it over all of the events that happened in the interim. Without this functionality all of those business critical events would be lost.

That being said, there may be scenarios where you want to explicitly discard your business data -- to support that case we'll look at adding an option to delete the trigger data so you can start again from scratch.

Turning off Flow and turning back on still create ... - Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Lin Tu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[cdn4lf]

@v-litu-msft ,

I have added my comments to the feature request.  I still haven't been told where it says that off will treat the data like a pause feature, and based on the comments this isn't properly recorded anywhere.

Hopefully this will get fixed quickly as errors caused by oversights in documentation like these create problems for all of us.