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How to stop new flows from starting if one is already processing?

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Posted on by bbrazeau

We have a scheduled flow that checks for new data a few times an hour and a typical run takes a minute or less. Recently the vendor reset the flag on all the data causing a few hundred rows to reprocess. This took a few hours to complete.

No big deal, except that each subsquent scheduled run of the flow saw the same couple hundred rows requiring processing. In some instances I can understand multiple flows running at the same time to be a good thing, but not in this particular Flow's case.

Is there a setting available that would have the flow engine check if there is an active run, and if so, skip that schedule? There are ways to manually track a status we could build, but I was wondering if there was anything out of the box.

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v-yuazh-msft on at

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Hi @ bbrazeau,

Do you want to stop new flows from starting if one is already processing?

Stopping new flows from starting if one is already processing is not supported in microsoft flow currently,I afraid that there is no way to achieve your needs in Microsoft Flow currently.

If you would like this feature to be added in Microsoft Flow, please submit an idea to Flow Ideas Forum:

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Flow-Ideas/idb-p/FlowIdeas

Regards,
Alice Zhang

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bbrazeau 63 on at

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Thanks for the response. I've submitted one at
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Flow-Ideas/Prevent-Flow-from-starting-if-already-running/idi-p/105469

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Once again, something needed as a basic requirement is not implemented. The amount of time taken to add these basic features to the core platform and core MS products is beyond a joke. Stop developing all the other non-MS connectors and focus on your own stuff first!

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ee61re on at

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See https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/General-Flow-Discussion/Is-it-possible-to-wait-for-a-flow-run-to-complete-before-the/td-p/185911

(Bascially you can limit the concurrency on the Flow trigger action to 1 - it is unlimited by default)

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hi,

This has already been realized in Microsoft flow. If you:
1. Go to the settings of the first step of the flow
2. Ture on Concurrency Control
3. Degree of Parallelism, make this value 1

Then what you want will be realized. When the first-triggered flow is running the second-triggered flow will run after the first one finishing running.

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SeemaHemant 3 on at

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You may want to try setting the Concurrency to 1 in the trigger settings.

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NickTT 236 on at

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No, this just causes the flows to queue up. It doesn't prevent a user from triggering lets say an approval workflow a second time. For instance, I have a multi-stage approval workflow that a user will manually trigger. Sometimes the user doesn't see the popup that the workflow was started, or the browser doesn't auto refresh to show that a status field shows the workflow is in progress. So they smash the run flow a bunch of times. I need a nice way to ignore these button smashers. 🙂

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NickTT 236 on at

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My work around is to default a "Progress" field to "Not Submitted". I then use the Get File Properties task to pull that value. I then use that in a SWITCH command to check the status. I used a SWITCH step here because there are a few "Progress" stages where I want the User to be able to resubmit the workflow. Then in my Default stage I use the Terminate command with the status of Canceled. Following the switch step I immediately up-date the "Progress" field to "Submitted".

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