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Ending a flow via hotkey?

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Posted on by IAQG

Hi all,

Is there a way to stop a flow via hotkey? I've been using Robotask for my desktop automation and I wanted to look in to what Power Automate had to offer for desktop automation. I generally iterate pretty rapidly and if something breaks, I want to be able to shut things down immediately, so in previous projects I've had a global hotkey that stops any currently active processes. Is there something in Power Automate? I saw in the Debug pane a Stop button with the Shift+F5 combination, but I could only get it to work if the Power Automate window was focused. For example, if the flow was writing some text to a Notepad file and I pressed Shift+F5, the flow did not stop. The flows that I'm looking to make would use a lot of mouse movements, so if something went wrong it would likely be very difficult for the user to maneuver back to the Power Automate screen to press the stop hotkey there.

Related secondary question: If one has the Block Input action enabled, is it possible to stop a flow that hasn't hit a error?

Thank you for any assistance you can give. I'm still very new to the program, so I may have missed something that experienced users might think is obvious.

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miketran13 720 on at

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Hi,

From my experience, I don't see any hotkeys that can help you. For the hotkey Shift + F5 when debugging, it actually does not work as you said because when running, it will not have the focus on the PAD so you can't use that, or you must try yourself to focus on the PAD before sending the hotkeys.
However, it will not work in the real world because when running the flow without debugging, you will not have the IDE and the focus will change too fast from application to application.

Actually, when implementing the flow with PAD, you can have a lot of steps for checking the state / status of the fields or controls before doing anything. If these steps do not pass, then you just stop the flow there and write logs / send email.

In PAD, you also have an action "On Block Error", it will catch the error for all action inside that block, once you got error with any actions inside the block, you can also write logs, stop the flow.

Thanks and hope it can help you.
Mike
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IAQG 96 on at

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Found a solution that worked for me. Under settings there is an option for a global kill command:
So this works to kill all running processes. Hope this helps anyone else who's new like me with the same question.

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JAWL 393 on at

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Hi @IAQG

I pressed the hotkeys altogether simultaneously but that does not stop the desktop flow though. Any thoughts?

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IAQG 96 on at

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@JAWLI'm not sure the specifics of what all is happening in your flow, but I can say that the hotkey does not work if you're running from the flow builder panel. So if you press play here:
then it won't work. If you are using the play button on the main PAD page, it should work:

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